
Class. lP fV5 ll 

Book "Pa 



Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



VARIOUS VIEWS 



VARIOUS VIEWS 



BY 

WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 




CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG & CO. 

1902 



THF ;' 

TO) AVA^qv 

^ KXft No. 
COPY 8. 



^ 



'V 



^ 



Copyright 

A. C. McClurg & Co. 

1902 

Published October, 1902 



Composition by The Dial Press, Chicago, U.S.A. 
Presswork by The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A. 



TO 

PAUL SHOREY 

WITH 

THIRTY YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP 



PREFACE. 

This book is a companion volume to ( Little Leaders' and 
* Editorial Echoes. ' Like its predecessors, it is made up 
of thirty leading articles written for ' The Dial ' during 
recent years. A few inconsiderable changes in the orig- 
inal text have been made, but the papers remain substan- 
tially' what they were when first printed, and even the 
conventional editorial style has been retained. The mis- 
cellaneous character of the papers here brought together 
has made impossible the threefold classification of the 
earlier volumes, although a rough grouping according to 
subject-matter has been attempted. It will be found, 
however, that, as before, the writer has been chiefly pre- 
occupied with themes suggested by the broader aspects 
of literary history and criticism. 
Chicago, October i, 1902. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

The Hugo Centenary n 

Alexander the Great 22 

Shakespeare in France 32 

The Tie That Binds 42 

International Amity 50 

Hero-Worship 57 

A Philistine Watchword 67 

A Question of Literary Conscience ... 75 

The Artist and the Man 83 

The Duties of Authors 93 

Tendencies in Literature 102 

Energy and Art 109 

The Architecture of the Mind . . . .119 

Idiom and Ideal 128 

The Revaluation of Literature . . . .136 

The Gentle Reader 145 

The Triumph of the Novelist 153 

The Revival of Romance 161 

The Great American Novel 169 

The Novel and the Library 178 

The Drama as Art 189 

The Endowed Theatre 198 



x. CONTENTS — Continued. 

PAGE 

M. Brunetiere's Pedagogical Prescription . 207 
The Critic as Picker and Stealer v * .215 
A Word for Minor Poetry ....*, 223 

Newspaper Science , , . 231 

The Decay of American Journalism . , . 242 
The Star System in Publishing \ , > -25* 

The Young Person » , 260 

The New Patriotic Impulse * . * > . g » 269 



THE HUGO CENTENARY. 

Seventeen years ago, the death of Victor Hugo, 
at the age of eighty-three, plunged into mourn- 
ing the whole civilized world. At Goethe's age, 
and Voltaire's, within a few months, he entered 
into rest, and of all the great men of European 
letters since Shakespeare, those two alone seemed 
worthy to be named with him. For more than 
half a century, his rank had been preeminent, not 
among French writers alone, but among those 
of the whole world, and his venerable declining 
years had been crowned with such glory as is 
won by few indeed among the sons of men. 
His genius had so dominated the century which 
it illustrated that it seemed as if history must 
henceforth remember the period by his name, 
and speak of the Age of Hugo as it speaks of the 
Age of Dante or the Age of Shakespeare. 

Now that the years of Victor Hugo's life, 
added to the years that have elapsed since his 
death, have made up the full sum of one hun- 



i2 Various Views 

dred, and men touched with his spirit and in- 
spired by his message are engaged — not alone 
in the country that has the first claim upon his 
memory — in recalling his splendid services to 
humanity and his priceless contributions to the 
treasury of that literature which has the breath 
of life everlasting, — now that the centennial 
year of his birth has been reached, it becomes 
pertinent to ask how time has dealt with his 
reputation, and how strong is still the hold of his 
works upon the artistic sense and the conscience 
of the generation that has come after him. The 
final appraisal is not yet possible, nor will it be 
for perhaps a hundred years to come, but some 
things may now be said that our posterity will 
not be likely to repudiate. For it must be re- 
membered that Hugo's work has been tested by 
the apparatus of the critic during a much longer 
period than the term of years that he has been 
in his grave. It is now three-quarters of a cen- 
tury since the famous pronunciamento of c Crom- 
well' was delivered, and it is nearly as long since 
the pitched battle between the romanticists and 
classicists that was occasioned by the premiere of 
c Hernani.' During all that time, the genius of 



The Hugo Centenary 13 

Hugo has been hotly championed by some, and 
bitterly assailed by others. When he died, de- 
traction had already done its worst upon him, 
and his fame had emerged well-nigh untarnished 
from the smoke of the critical conflict. Since 
1885, his assailants have found nothing to say of 
him so severe as what was said long before that 
date, and the recognition of his finer qualities — 

always admitted bv those who dealt with him the 

j j 

most roughly — has been less grudgingly admitted 
even by those who have felt bound to enter their 
caveat against his acceptance as one of the great 
figures in the history of literature. 

We have observed with close attention the 
currents and counter-currents of recent opinion 
concerning Hugo's work, and it seems to us that 
there has gradually shaped itself, in the conscious- 
ness of his own compatriots as well as in the 
consciousness of the cosmopolitan tribunal of 
letters, an image of the poet that looms larger 
and larger as the age recedes from him, an image 
so colossal that it dwarfs all others of his world- 
contemporaries in the retrospective vision. Can 
we as Englishmen, great as must be our rever- 
ence for the memories of Shelley and Words- 



14 Various Views 

worth and Tennyson, of Carlyle and Ruskin 
and Emerson, can we in fairness claim that any 
of these men matches Hugo in artistic and moral 
stature ? Can a German make the claim for 
Heine, can an Italian make it for Signor Carducci, 
can a Russian make it for Tourguenieff, can a 
Norwegian make it for Dr. Ibsen ? Can a 
Frenchman fairly make it for Musset or Balzac 
or Renan ? To ask these questions, it seems to 
us, is to make it clear that negative answers are 
the only possible ones. Certain aspects of the 
genius of these other men may appeal to us more 
deeply, or strike more responsive chords in our 
consciousness, but the noblest personality of 
them all, with the sum total of its achievement, 
set beside the personality and the achievement of 
Hugo, must suffer in the comparison. c The 
spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century,' 
Mr. Swinburne calls him, and, whatever critical 
reservations we may make upon this point or 
upon that, it seems that the ascription is still the 
just due of the great poet, novelist, and dramatist 
whose writings have now been steadily pouring 
from the press for a period of nearly eighty years. 
Against this secular canonization of the poet 



The Hugo Centenary 15 

the devil's advocate has advanced three main 
charges. The first is that, while parading om- 
niscience, he is guilty of gross inaccuracies of 
scholarship and grotesque perversions of the 
truth. This charge may fairly be allowed. 
c L'Homme Qui Rit,' for example, is a ro- 
mance pour rire as far as its background of his- 
torical fact is concerned. c Notre Dame de 
Paris,' with its c deux tours de granit faites par 
Charlemagne,' is not in much better case, 
although its subject is the history of the poet's 
own countrv. In short, the story of Hugo's 
blunders is as lengthv as it is amusing. The 
second charge is that he is a rhetorician, who 
cultivated a turgid, bombastic, and sensational 
manner of composition, instead of following in 
the footsteps of the great masters of style. This 
charge has a qualified truth, although it reduces 
for the most part to the complaint which the 
classicist alwavs makes of the romanticist, and 
begs the deeper question which is really at issue. 
And if c Hernani,' for example, is rhetoric rather 
than poetry, as perhaps it is, what splendid rhet- 
oric it offers its readers ! When before in the 
French drama were c points ' ever made with 



16 Various Views 

such telling effect as in this melodramatic inven- 
tion ! c Vous n'allez pas au fond,' c Couvrons 
nous, grands d'Espagne,' 4 Dieu ! je suis ex- 
aucee,' c J'en passe, et des meilleurs,' — how 
the examples crowd upon the memory ! It may 
be rhetoric, but the emotions which it arouses are 
not readily to be distinguished from those which 
we experience from the purest tragic poetrv. 

Concerning the third charge, which makes the 
poet out as a person of unbounded egotism and 
colossal self-esteem, it may be admitted that 
Hugo frequently spoke of himself in terms that 
his truest friends might wish had been left to 
others to formulate. Yet modesty and self- 
effacement are virtues that may be carried too far, 
and in Hugo's case their assumption would have 
been a hypocritical affectation. The prophet 
must be self-conscious, else he is no prophet; he 
must have an exalted sense of his mission, and a 
fervent belief in the truth of his message. And 
if any nineteenth century utterance may be called 
prophetic, it w T as surelv that of the man who 
proclaimed that 

c Le poete, en des jours impies, 
Vient preparer des jours meilleurs/ 



The Hugo Centenary 17 

and whose faith in the sacredness of his calling 
did not waver to the end. Posterity never con- 
demns a man for taking the true measure of him- 
self, even if that measure be a large one ; it is 
only to his contemporaries, and during the period 
when his true dimensions are the subject of con- 
troversy, that such self-appraisal seems an act of 
questionable taste. When we read of Shake- 
speare declaring that his rhyme shall outlive c the 
gilded monuments of princes,' or of Dante say- 
ing, with magnificent arrogance, — the question 
being of an important embassy, — c S'io vo, chi 
sta ; s'io sto, chi va?' we applaud rather than 
condemn, we admire rather than deride, the abso- 
lute conviction of the phrase. Posterity has 
accepted these men at their own estimates ; it is 
more than possible that posteritv may accept 
Hugo at his own estimate. 

There are spots upon the sun — this is about 
the substance of what unsympathetic criticism 
discovers in its examination of the work of Victor 
Hugo. But those who all their lives have bathed 
in the sunlight, and felt its vivifying warmth, are 
content to be simply grateful, and will not, for 

knowledge of the sun-spots, declare the moon 
2 



18 Various Views 

to be a more satisfactory orb. The positive 
achievement of Hugo is so immense that a vol- 
ume would be needed for the barest summary. 
Leaving aside his miscellaneous prose, descrip- 
tive, fanciful, speculative, critical, and political, 
there remain the three great categories of strictly 
creative work, poetry, romance, and drama. 
This seems to be the order in which they will 
eventually stand, the order in which serious 
criticism has already placed them. To the 
creator of c Hernani,' c Ruy Bias,' and c Marion 
Delorme,' we must give the credit of accom- 
plishing the romantic revolution in French dra- 
matic art. To the creator of c Notre Dame de 
Paris,' c Les Miserables,' and c Quatre-vingt- 
treize,' we must give the credit of promulgating 
a new conception of the teachings of history and 
a new gospel of social solidarity. To the creator 
of c Les Contemplations,' c Les Chatiments,' 
and c La Legende des Siecles ' we must give the 
credit of first revealing the full singing possibilities 
of the French language, of rising to such a height 
of lyric expression as had been attained by no 
French poet before, of crowning the splendid 
edifice of French literature with its supreme 



The Hugo Centenary 19 

revelation of pinnacled beauty. In this lyrical 
domain Hugo out-sang all the other poets of his 
age, and most of the poets of all ages ; he rose 
as upon the pinions of the eagle, and matched 
the richness of Pindar; he soared as with the 
skylark's wings, and matched the pure note of 
Shelley. When at the height of his inspiration, 
he poured forth strains of everlasting melody, 
which were yet linked in thought with the noblest 
aspirations of the human spirit ; for his genius, 
while ever striving after the beautiful, never for- 
got its allegiance to the true and the good — to 
the other aspects of what must ever remain the 
triune ideal of the soul of man. 

One thing more must be said to round out 
this commemorative tribute to the poet whose 
centenary is now at hand. Of another great 
poet it has been written : 

6 It is indeed 
Forever well our singers should 
Utter good words and know them good 
Not through song only; with close heed 
Lest, having spent for the work's sake 
Six days, the man be left to make."* 

It is c not through song only ' that we love and 
cherish the memory of Victor Hugo. To the 



20 Various Views 

man also our tribute is due — the man who spoke 
brave words for freedom when such words were 
most needed, the man who, at the sacrifice of all 
that was dear to him, translated into action the 
faith that was his, and made his protest against 
tyranny doubly eloquent by his example. One 
of the most grudging of his English critics is 
inspired to enthusiasm by the contemplation of 
the chief act in Hugo's life, and writes of it 
in terms of such admiration that we can sug- 
gest nothing to add. c The great fact remains. 
M. Hugo, in scorn of amnesties and invitations, 
lived out nineteen years of exile ; his voice did 
not fail nor his heart falter ; he stood on his rock 
in the free British seas, like Elijah on Carmel, 
spokesman and champion of all those who had 
not bowed the knee to Baal.' The example is 

one for all time and for all men. Onlv one man 

j 

in a century may embody his protest against 
wrong in a volume of c Chatiments,' but every 
man may have the strength of purpose to stand 
for what he believes to be the right, whatever 
the forces that are leagued against him. In 
these lax days of service to the spirit of com- 
promise, there is no lesson more needed than 



The Hugo Centenary 21 

that of Victor Hugo's 'Ultima Verba' — those 
words which seemed futile enough at the time of 
their deliverance, but which, in the light of sub- 
sequent history, are seen to have been the very 
sign and seal of the poet's prophetic function. 



22 Various Views 



ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 

c I was born,' says Alexandre Dumas, c at Villers- 
Cotterets, a little town in the department of 
the Aisne, on the Paris road, about two hun- 
dred paces from the Rue de la Noue, where 
Demoustiers died, two leagues from La Ferte- 
Milon, where Racine was born, and seven 
leagues from Chateau-Thierry, where La Fon- 
taine first saw the light. I was born on July 24, 
1802, at half-past five in the morning, in the 
Rue de Lormet, in a house which now belongs 
to my friend Cartier, who would gladly sell it to 
me any day, so that I may be able to die in the 
very room where I was born.' As a matter of 
fact, he never did buy the house, but died, De- 
cember 5, 1870, in a little town near Dieppe, 
whither he had been carried from Paris by his 
devoted son, on the eve of the German invest- 
ment of the Capital, in order that his last davs 
might be spared the privations of the siege. 
Something more than a year later, when his 



Alexander the Great 23 

country was again at peace, his remains received 
final interment in his native town, in the pres- 
ence of a famous following of authors, artists, 
and actors. 

The bit of autobiography above quoted is 
characteristic at once of the geniality and the 
egotism of the man who wrote it. It quite takes 
for granted the reader's interest in every slightest 
personal particular that the writer may see fit to 
impart; it takes also for granted the reader's 
acceptance of the fact that neither Racine nor 
La Fontaine could possibly shed any greater 
lustre upon the region of their common birth 
than was shed by the author of c Monte Cristo' 
and c Les Trois Mousquetaires.' Of his own 
greatness, indeed, Alexandre Dumas retained an 
unshaken conviction throughout his long career. 
At the height of that career, he could assert 
with perfect self-assurance that for a quarter of 
a century past three men, Hugo, Lamartine, and 
himself, had remained at the head of contempo- 
rary French literature ; our only marvel is that he 
should not have set his own name first in that 
trinity of literary fame. We are not of those to 
whom such assertions are always and necessarily 



24 Various Views 

amusing. They may express the proud self- 
consciousness of genius, or they may merely in- 
dicate a remarkable capacity for self-deception. 
When Dante and Shakespeare state what we 
know to be the simple truth concerning their 
own work, we applaud rather than rebuke, hold- 
ing such frank utterance in higher esteem than 
any exhibition of mock modesty. But in the 
case of Dumas the effect of such self-assertion 
is on the whole, an entertaining illustration of 
the delusion of the egotist. That he was a great 
writer in the sense in which Hugo was a great 
writer is, of course, a preposterous notion ; and 
that he should honestly have ranked himself with 
his most illustrious contemporary shows only the 
fact that his critical faculty, weak in any case, was 
absolutely incapable of taking the measure of his 
own work. 

Although a writer of only the second rank, 
Dumas looms up astonishingly in the French 
literature of the last century, and he still holds 
his own surprisingly well. In some respects his 
position is better to-day than it was at any time 
during his life. His enemies did their worst to 
break down his reputation while he was still 



Alexander the Great 25 

alive ; after his death, there was nothing more 
to be urged against him than had already been 
urged, and his fame did not suffer the reaction 
that commonly follows upon the death of a great 
writer. Dumas was never set upon such a 
pinnacle as Hugo in the esteem of his admiring 
fellow-countrymen, and hence was never in so 
perilous a position. He was immensely popular, 
but he was not revered as a prophet and a sage. 
He has preserved his popularity at home for a 
full generation after his death, while abroad he is 
both better known and better appreciated than he 
was at any time while alive. 

But as far as the English-speaking world is 
concerned, the vogue, if not the fame, of Dumas 
seems to have been mainly posthumous. The 
last generation was inclined to regard with dark 
suspicion the works of all French novelists, and 
the romances of Alexandre Dumas were held, 
mostly by persons who had never read them, to 
be typically c French ' in their wicked levity, and 
consequently to be shunned by all righteous- 
minded readers. When translated into English, 
the romances were published in such a way as 
to repel persons of taste, and attract only those 



26 Various Views 

classes of readers to whom literature proper 
makes no appeal whatever. Well do we re- 
member the big and ugly volumes, badly printed 
and bound in depressing black, in which form 
alone the American readers of twenty or thirty 
years ago might make the acquaintance of 
d'Artagnan and Monte Cristo. Things are 
very different now, when tasteful editions abound, 
when the old-fashioned prejudices have disap- 
peared, and when we have all of us become more 
or less denizens of the joyous realm of romantic 
invention which is still ruled by the spirit of 
Alexandre Dumas. 

It was along in the eighties, we should say, 
that English and American readers of the more 
discriminating sort came to be attracted in con- 
siderable numbers to the romances of Dumas. 
Before that time, his following had been large but 
uncritical, — it had been a following made up for 
the most part of seekers for the sensational in 
literature, of readers who were satisfied with 
highly-spiced invention, and who recked little of 
constructive art. But Dumas really deserved a 
better fate than the applause of this class of read- 
ers, and he received his deserts in due course of 



Alexander the Great 27 

time. It was about twenty years ago that two 
English critics of undeniable authority gave as- 
surance to timid souls that their enjoyment of the 
French romancer was quite legitimate, and that 
the adventures of the three musketeers really be- 
longed to literature. It is, we think, chiefly to 
Mr. Andrew Lang and Robert Louis Stevenson 
that the literary rehabilitation of Dumas with 
the English-speaking public is to be credited, for 
these men boldly proclaimed what many readers 
of taste had felt without quite daring to assert. 
They had coupled in thought the names of 
Dumas and Scott, but Mr. Lang ventured to 
make the conjunction on the printed page. Ad- 
dressing the spirit of the Frenchman, he said : 

'Than yours there has been no greater nor more 
kindly and beneficent force in modern letters. To Scott, 
indeed, you owed the first impulse of your genius ; but, 
once set in motion, what miracles could it not accom- 
plish ? Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a 
superhuman burden; but your imaginative strength never 
found a task too great for it. It is good, in a day of 
small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of 
your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas' s men 
— so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, 
and such trenchermen. * 

This frank and generous praise is echoed by 



28 Various Views 

• 

Stevenson, who, closing his c Vicomte de Bra- 
gelonne ' after the fifth perusal, expresses his en- 
thusiastic admiration in a series of queries which 
are in fact challenges to all disputants. 

'What other novel has such epic variety and nobility 
of incident? Often, if you will, impossible; often of the 
order of an Arabian story; and yet all based on human 
nature. For if you come to that, what novel has more 
human nature ? Not studied with the microscope, but 
seen largely in plain daylight, with the natural eye ? 
What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, 
and unflagging, admirable literary skill ? . . . And, once 
more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is 
inspired with a more unstrained or a more wholesome 
morality ? * 

These words take us far indeed from the stand- 
point of middle-class propriety and narrow puri- 
tanical outlook. They mark the larger and saner 
critical light in which our own generation has 
come to view the famous literature of the past. 
In the presence of such tributes as these, the 
unlovely aspects of the character of Dumas, and 
the dubious aspects of his literary methods, sink 
into relative insignificance. Granted that he was 
a swaggerer and vainglorious, that petty jealousies 
and hypocrisies marked many stages of his career, 
that in his financial relations he held his personal 



Alexander the Great 29 

honor too lightly; granted also that his literary 
supercheries were of unexampled audacity, that 
he pillaged ideas and situations from all sorts of 
sources, that he lent his name to books that 
others had written, — granted all these things, 
with many others of like tenor, the fact remains 
that he possessed an astonishingly original and 
prolific genius, that besides much slipshod writing 
that has long since been forgotten he produced 
a series of masterpieces that the world will not 
willingly let die, and that his higher ideals were 
on the whole ideals of manliness and clean living 
and devotion to admirable artistic aims. 

Long before Dumas had become popular with 
English readers, at a time when they thought of 
him, so far as they thought at all, as of a writer 
whose stock in trade was a shallow sensationalism 
and a picturesque perversion of historical hap- 
penings, he was known and loved by no less a 
man than Thackeray, who found no difficulty in 
rising above English prejudice and contracting a 
very genuine sympathy for the most gasconading 
of Frenchmen. This is the language in which 
Thackeray deals with the vexed matter of col- 
laboration : 



30 Various Views 

* They say that all the works bearing Dumas' s name 
are not written by him. Well ? does not the chief cook 
have aides under him ? Did not Rubens' s pupils paint 
on his canvases ? Had not Lawrence assistants for his 
backgrounds ? For myself, being also du metier, I con- 
fess I would often like to have a competent, respectable, 
and rapid clerk for the business part of my novels, and 
on his arrival at eleven o'clock, would say, " Mr. Jones, 
if you please, the archbishop must die this morning in 
about five pages. Turn to article ' Dropsy ' (or what 
you will ) in Encyclopaedia. Take care there are no 
medical blunders in his death. Group his daughters, 
physicians, and chaplains round him. In Wales's ( Lon- 
don,' letter B, third shelf, you will find an account of 
Lambeth, and some prints of the place. Colour in with 
local colouring. The daughter will come down and speak 
to her lover in his wherry at Lambeth Stairs," etc., etc. 
Jones (an intelligent young man) examines the medical, 
historical, topographical books necessary, his chief points 
out to him in Jeremy Taylor (fol. London, MDCLV.) 
a few remarks such as might befit a dear old archbishop 
departing this life. When I come back to dress for 
dinner the archbishop is dead on my table, in five pages, 
medicine, topography, theology, all right, and Jones has 
gone home to his family some hours.' 

According to some such fashion as this, no 
doubt, much of the work of Alexandre Dumas 
was done, but we know as well as Thackeray 
did that by no such method is a trio of mus- 
keteers to be created. It is to the creative genius 



Alexander the Great 31 

that gave life to the work, however the details 

might be executed, that Thackeray's tribute is 

paid. 

1 Of your heroic heroes, I think our friend Monseig- 
neur Athos, Count de la Fere, is my favorite. I have 
read about him from sunrise to sunset with the utmost 
contentment of mind. He has passed through how many 
volumes ? Forty ? Fifty ? I wish, for my part, there were 
a hundred more, and would never tire of his rescuing 
prisoners, punishing ruffians, and running scoundrels 
through the midriff with his most graceful rapier.' 



32 Various Views 



SHAKESPEARE IN FRANCE. 

The learned M. Jusserand, who is as entertain- 
ing as he is learned, and who has done almost as 
much as Taine did (although in a very different 
way) to give a new interest to the history of 
English literature, has published a book upon 
the fortunes of Shakespeare among the French- 
men. The subject of this investigation is so 
novel, as well as so interesting inherently, that 
it seems worth while to tell M. Jusserand's story 
in condensed form, although it has been made 
fully accessible to English readers. Of course, 
we all know in its general outline the history 
of Shakespearian study in France, but few even 
among students know the interesting details of 
the narrative which M. Jusserand has illustrated 
from the wealth of his rich and curious reading, 
which he has adorned with his piquant style and 
warmed with his sympathetic c appreciation ' of 
the greatest poet of the modern world. 

M. Jusserand introduces his narrative by setting 



Shakespeare in France 33 

side by side two passages, published respectively 
in 1645 and 1765, and roughly indicating the 
limits of the period to which the chief interest 
of the story attaches, the period during which 
Shakespeare won his way to the French con- 
sciousness. The first extract is from Blaeu's 
c Theatre du Monde,' a sort of glorified gaz- 
eteer, and informs the reader that Stratford is a 
pleasant little town which owes its entire glory 
to c Jehan de Stratford, archeveque de Cantor- 
bery' and c Hugues de Clopton, juge a Londres.' 
One of these worthies, it seems, built a church 
in Stratford, and the other spanned the Avon 
with a bridge. To this writer, Shakespeare was 
less than a name ; Stratford had enough of glory 
in its claim upon the primate and the judge. 
The other extract is from the c Encyclopaedia,' 
and speaks of Stratford in this fashion : c It was 
not long ago that the house in which Shake- 
speare (William) died in 16 16 was still pointed 
out in this town; it was even regarded as a curi- 
osity of the country and the inhabitants regretted 
its destruction, so jealous are they of the glory of 
having given birth to this sublime genius, the 
greatest in all dramatic poetry.' The article fills 



34 Various Views 

five columns, and although its title is c Stratford,' 
its exclusive subject is Shakespeare. To trace 
the history of the change in French opinion thus 
brought about by a century has been the task of 
M. Jusserand, and the subject is one richly de- 
serving of attention. 

The first judgment upon Shakespeare to find 
expression in the French language occurs in a 
catalogue of the Roval Library (1675-1684). A 
copy of the second folio had found its way into 
the collection, and the entry of the cataloguer 
included, besides a Latinized form of the title, 
the following note : c This English poet has a 
rather fine imagination, he thinks naturally, he 
expresses himself with delicacy, but these fine 
qualities are darkened bv the filth that he mingles 
with his comedies.' An inventory of Fouquet's 
library shows that it also contained a volume of 
Shakespeare c valued at one livre.' The first 
printed mention of Shakespeare in France occurs 
in Baillet's c Jugements des Savants' (1685-6). 
Here the name is given, without comment, in a 
list of English poets. Two or three other fugitive 
allusions to a poet variously named l Shakspear ' 
and 4 Shakees Pear' may be found during the 



Shakespeare in France 35 

closing years of the reign of the Roi-Soleil, but 
the great age of French literature was over, and 
Corneille, Racine, and Moliere had long been in 
their graves, before even a Frenchman here and 
there had so much as dreamed that the English 
poet who had died when Corneille was a boy of 
ten was destined to enjoy a heritage of fame so 
world-wide and so enduring that even the genius 
of Moliere would come to seem pale in the com- 
parison. 

The first half of the eighteenth century 
changed all this. Not only did Shakespeare be- 
come widelv known in France, through criticism 
and even through translation, but his plays be- 
gan to influence the French stage, and to awaken 
an uneasy feeling that possibly the rules of the 
classic drama might not have said the final word 
upon the subject of dramatic composition. Dur- 
ing the period in question a great many writers 
found occasion to speak of Shakespeare in ap- 
preciative terms, and some of these writers were 
men whose opinions carried much weight. The 
Abbe Prevost, who made a long stay in England, 
and began to publish his 4 Memoires' in 1728, 
became a genuine anglomaniac, the first in date 



36 Various Views 

of a numerous tribe. The beauty of Mrs. 
Oldfield inspired him to learn her language, and, 
having learned it, he read Shakespeare and waxed 
enthusiastic. c For beauty of sentiment,' he 
says, c whether tender or sublime, for the tragic 
form which stirs the depths of the heart and 
infallibly arouses passion in the dullest souls, 
for energy of expression and for the art of con- 
triving situations and carrying on an action, I 
have read nothing, either in Greek or in French, 
which takes the palm from the English drama.' 
Even Montesquieu felt compelled to have an 
opinion concerning Shakespeare, although, as 
M. Jusserand remarks, it does him less honor 
than his opinions upon government. In 1830, 
he had an audience with the queen, who began to 
talk about the drama. She asked Lord Ches- 
terfield, who was also present, how it happened 
that Shakespeare, who lived in the age Elizabeth, 
had made his women speak so badly and act so 
foolishly. ; Milord Chesterfield answered the 
question very well by saying that women did not 
appear upon the stage, and that their parts were 
taken by poor actors, for which reason Shakes- 
peare did not take any great pains to make them 



Shakespeare in France 37 

speak well. I should give the other reason that, 
to make women speak well, one must know 
the ways and the conventions of society. To 
make heroes speak, book knowledge is all that 
is necessary.' These explanations, observes the 
commentator, 'enabled Queen Caroline (to whom 
Voltaire had just dedicated his u Henriade") 
to understand why Beatrice, Rosalind, Portia, 
and Juliet speak so badly and are so foolish.' 
Meanwhile, Voltaire, who had the precious gift 
of writing with c blacker ink ' than other men, 
and of compelling attention to whatever he might 
choose to say, had lived for three years in Lon- 
don, and published his c Lettres Philosophiques ' 
in 1734. Henceforth, there was no escaping 
Shakespeare for the cultivated Frenchman, for 
Voltaire said things about him that could not 
possibly be ignored. His appreciation was qual- 
ified, but for that perhaps all the more forcible, 
and it is quite evident that he was more deeply 
impressed than he was willing to let appear. 
In the 4 Lettres ' he said : c Shakespeare had 
a genius full of force and fertility, of what 
is natural and what is sublime, with not the 
least spark of good taste, and without the least 



38 Various Views , 

knowledge of the rules.' In the introduction to 
c Semiramis ' (1748), where the famous epithet 
of the c drunken savage ' occurs, he said that 
c Hamlet ' contains c sublime strokes worthy of 
the loftiest geniuses. It seems as if nature had 
taken delight in collecting within the brain of 
Shakespeare all that we can imagine of what is 
greatest and most powerful, with all that rudeness 
without wit can contain of what is lowest and 
most detestable.' Testimonies to Shakespeare 
were now rapidly multiplying. Riccoboni(i738) 
wrote a history of the English stage, saying of 
Shakespeare that 4 having used up his patrimony, 
he took up the trade of robber. He wrote san- 
guinary dramas, "Hamlet" among others, and 
" Othello," in which we witness the incredible 
strangling of Desdemona.' Le Blanc (1745) 
found fairly fitting words in which to express the 
magic of Shakespeare's style. Finally, La Place 
(1 746) made a French translation of many of the 
plays, and prepared analyses of the others. 

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, we 
come face to face with the c Shakespeare ques- 
tion,' which fills the last and most interesting 
chapter in all this curious history. Speaking of 



Shakespeare in France 39 

the translation of c Tom Jones' made in 1750, 

d'Argenson remarked : c Anglicism is gaining 

upon us/ while Boissy, in a comedy dated 1753, 

made sport of the fickle tastes of the French 

public, which sought after strange gods, now in 

Italy, now in England. 

1 Son transport P autre jour etait Tanglomanie; 
Rien sans V habit anglais ne pouvait reussir; 
Au-dessus de Corneille il mettait Shakespir.* 

Something clearly had to be done, and Voltaire, 
who felt that both his critical precept and his 
practice as a dramatic poet had been largely 
responsible for this exaltation of the 8 sauvage 
ivre,' stepped into the breach. It was all very 
well to praise Shakespeare in measured terms, 
as he had himself done, but when it came to a 
complete and sumptuous translation, dedicated to 
the king, and prefaced by the judgment that 
c never had man of genius penetrated deeper into 
the abyss of the human heart or given better and 
more natural speech to the passions,' it was really 
going too far. c Had not he [Voltaire] granted 
enough to the monster ? Had not he introduced 
certain liberties to the French stage ? Had not 
he cleared, and pruned, and given regular shape 



40 Various Views 

to this lofty thicket ? ' But now there was noth- 
ing less in question than a revolution of taste. 
Even Diderot was calling Shakespeare c a Gothic 
colossus between whose legs we might all pass/ 
c All ? ' exclaimed Voltaire, and his indignation 
waxed. Nothing less than a formal protest to 
the Academy could suffice for such a critical sit- 
uation. c There are not in France enough buf- 
fets, enough foolscaps, enough pillories for such 
a fellow ' as the audacious Le Tourneur, who 
was responsible for the translation that was so 
heralded. c The frightful thing about it is that 
the monster has a party in France, and to cap 
the climax of calamity, it was I who formerly 
first spoke of this Shakespeare, it was I who first 
showed the French a few pearls that I had found 
in his enormous manure-heap.' Thus wrote the 
recluse of Ferney to a friend, and in this spirit 
was prepared his communication to the Academy. 
The protest was read at the session of August 25, 
1776, and its success, for the hour at least, was 
complete. A year or two later, and only a few 
weeks before his death, Voltaire inscribed his last 
tragedy to the Academy, and took occasion to re- 
new the attack. The letter ended with these 



Shakespeare in France 41 

words : c Shakespeare is a savage with sparks of 
genius that shine in a horrible night.' Thus 
closes this interesting and characteristic episode 
in Voltaire's life, and with it what is most signi- 
ficant about the history of the fortunes of Shake- 
speare in France under the old regime. 



42 Various Views 



THE TIE THAT BINDS. 

The beautiful story of the Athenian captives at 

Syracuse, set free and restored with all honors to 

their fatherland because they could recite verses 

from the poet best beloved of their captors, has 

been made familiar to us all by two among the 

noblest works of Robert Browning. c Any such 

happy man had prompt reward,' our poet tells us, 

1 If he lay bleeding on the battle-field 
They stanched his wounds, and gave him drink and food ; 
If he were slave V the house, for reverence 
The}/- rose up, bowed to who proved master now, 
And bade him go free, thank Euripides ! 
Ay, and such did so : many such, he said, 
Returning home to Athens, sought him out, 
The old bard in the solitary house, 
And thanked him ere they went to sacrifice.'' 

This story has much more than the virtue of an 
anecdote \ it has rather the significance of an eter- 
nal truth, of the everlasting power of literature 
to reconcile differences, to soften the asperities 
of intercourse between nations, to strengthen the 
bonds of sympathy between human beings, and to 



The Tie That Binds 43 

offer promise of that c Parliament of man, the Fed- 
eration of the world, 5 which the poet still insists 
upon foreseeing, however idle his dream be held 
by the reluctant and short-sighted multitude. 

While the vision of the seer halts at nothing 
short of this ideal of the brotherhood of man finally 
accomplished, he whose faith is less firm and 
whose gaze cannot descry things hidden so deep 
in the mists of the future may still find in the 
possession of a common speech some earnest of 
a harmonious union for all to whom that speech 
is native. Particularly true is this of us born to 
the use of the English language, 

1 Who speak the tongue 
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold 
Which Milton held.' 

A common language is the tie that binds men 
together almost in spite of themselves. This is 
true even if the language be one that has never 
risen to supreme excellence of expression upon 
the lips of the literary artist. A striking illustra- 
tion of this fact is offered by Miss Olive Schrei- 
ner, in her account of the uncouth Taal of the 
Boer. The Boer himself is of mixed Dutch and 
Huguenot strain, and his speech is an almost in- 



44 Various Views 

conceivably degraded dialect of the Dutch tongue. 
It is absolutely without a literature, and is prob- 
ably incapable of originating one. Yet it has fused 
into a compact nationality the heterogeneous ele- 
ments that went to the making of the Boer, and 
its unifying influence compels our admiration and 
our respect. If this be the power of a rough and 
poverty-stricken dialect, what limits may be set to 
the potency of so rich and refined an instrument 
of intercourse as the English language ? It is not 
from mere pride of race that the philosophical 
observer rejoices in the amazing spread of the 
English language over the face of the earth. It is 
rather that he feels the immense significance to 
the future of mankind that must attach to an ever- 
widening use of the tongue in whose literature are 
embodied the noblest civic and ethical ideals of 
the modern world. 

Ten generations have now followed one an- 
other since the man who in English speech gave 
supreme expression to these ideals was with us in 
the flesh. It is three centuries since the gentlest, 
and wisest, and deepest of modern souls was 
building the monument of song that none knew 
better than himself c would outlive the perishing 



The Tie That Binds 45 

body of men and things till the Resurrection of 
the Dead.' And who will dare say that the work 
of Shakespeare is more than barely begun ? Year 
after year we commemorate the anniversary of 
his birth, and each year we look back with rever- 
ence to the past because of the promise that it 
gives us for the future. The words spoken a 
few years ago at the Stratford celebration by the 
man who so worthily represented among the 
English people the best elements of American 
culture, and the message of good-will sent to the 
Birmingham gathering by the Chief Magistrate 
of our Republic, were both expressions of the 
feeling that a common claim to Shakespeare con- 
stitutes between England and the United States 
a bond of union too strong to be broken by dif- 
ferences that might cause other nations to fly at 
one another's throats, too sacred to be made the 
sport of political passion or weakened by petty 
international jealousies. 

The Philistine, we suppose, smiled at Mr. 
Cleveland's message, deeming it a bit of inef- 
fectual but harmless sentimentality, yet the mes- 
sage embodied a deeper truth than ever entered 
into the self-satisfied Philistine consciousness. 



46 Various Views 

Doubtless, also, he smiled at Mr. Bayard's asser- 
tion that America claimed Shakespeare no less 
than England, yet that too is the deepest kind of 
a truth. There is much reason to believe that 
the teaching of American history in our public 
schools leaves dominant in the child's mind an 
impression that England is our hereditary enemy. 
How much better it would be, and how much 
more essentially just, to emphasize the fact that, 
although temporary differences have now and 
then arisen between the two nations, yet these 
are as nothing in comparison with the glory of 
their common inheritance; that English history, 
from Alfred to Cromwell, belongs to us as right- 
fully as to our kinsmen over-sea, and should be 
to us a source of no less pride than that we justly 
take in the continuation of the history through 
Washington down to Lincoln. That this is the 
view ultimately to obtain among the English- 
speaking peoples seems to us certain. The very 
stars in their courses are working to bring it 
about, and the quiet, irresistible influence of a 
common intellectual tradition will some day ac- 
complish a closer and more vital union between 
the scattered sections of the English family than 



The Tie That Binds 47 

was ever cemented by bond of dynasty or political 
organization in the history of the world. There 
is a larger patriotism than that of the state, a wider 
fellowship than that of the geographical area ; it 
is in community of achievement and aspiration 
that men are in truth brothers, and it is in litera- 
ture that they find their real relationship. 

The mutterings of war between the two great 
English-speaking peoples not long ago called 
forth by a reckless play in the politico-diplomatic 
game have not been wholly evil in their effect. 
If they were accompanied by a melancholy dis- 
play of truculence on the part of time-serving 
politicians and journalists, they also served to 
make clear the almost absolute unanimity of the 
better elements of English-speaking society in 
rejecting the thought of such a war as a horror 
unspeakable and unthinkable. That it would be 
essentially civil war was the general verdict of 
sober-minded observers, for the essential charac- 
teristic of civil war is that the opposing forces 
should be sharers of the same sympathies and 
ideals, whether sharing or not the same govern- 
mental machinery. If all civilized nations knew 
each other as well as the sections of the English 



48 Various Views 

race know each other, all war would be civil war, 
and burdened with the awful responsibilities of 
such strife. The jingoes and the fomenters of 
international ill-feeling are poor prophets. We 
prefer to pin our faith to the prophecy of the dis- 
tinguished Englishman who once spoke to the 
members of the Harvard Law School. Upon 
that occasion, Sir Frederick Pollock, discussing 
c The Vocation of the Common Law,' brought 
his remarks to a close with a peroration so sig- 
nificant and so eloquent that we cannot resist 
the temptation to borrow it for the adornment of 
our own discussion of so nearly allied a theme. 
4 Dreams are not versed in issuable matter, and 
have no dates. Only I feel that this one looks 
forward, and will be seen as waking light some 
day. If anyone, being of little faith or over- 
curious, must needs ask in what day, I can an- 
swer only in the same fashion. We may know 
the signs, though we know not when they will 
come. These things will be when we look back 
on our dissensions in the past as brethren grown 
up to man's estate and dwelling in unity look 
back upon the bickerings of the nursery and the 
jealousies of the class-room ; when there is no use 



The Tie That Binds 49 

for the word u foreigner " between Cape Wrath 
and the Rio Grande, and the federated navies of 
the English-speaking nations keep the peace of 
the ocean under the Northern Lights and under 
the Southern Cross, from Vancouver to Sydney, 
and from the Channel to the Gulf of Mexico ; 
when an indestructible union of even wider grasp 
and higher potency than the federal bond of these 
States has knit our descendants into an invincible 
and indestructible concord.' 



5o Various Views 



INTERNATIONAL AMITY. 

A full generation has now passed since the 
publication of c The Coming Race,' by the 
versatile novelist who had given us books as 
various as c Pelham,' c A Strange Story,' c Harold,' 
c The Caxtons,' and c Kenelm Chillingly.' This 
forecast was impressive in many ways, but in 
no way more impressive than in its assertion 
that war would eventually be made impossible 
through improvements in the means of destruc- 
tion. Weapons would become so deadly that war 
would practically mean annihilation of the con- 
tending forces, and the good sense of the nations 
would prevail in the abandonment of this barbaric 
way of settling disputes. The past thirty years 
have witnessed, not exactly the literal fulfillment 
of this prediction, but marked progress in the 
direction of its fulfillment, and, as a natural con- 
sequence of the increased effectiveness of fighting 
instruments, a marked reluctance to resort to the 
arbitrament of war. 



International Amity 51 

Within much more recent years, a great Rus- 
sian authority upon the art of war, as well as a 
man of the widest experience in practical affairs, 
has argued with convincing logic that war is fast 
becoming a practical impossibility. This be- 
neficent result of scientific progress is due, not 
simply, as in Bulwer's argument, because of the 
increasing deadliness of weapons, but rather be- 
cause, with this increasing deadliness, the advan- 
tage to the defense becomes so much greater than 
the advantage to the attack that all wars of the 
ordinary type, in which an invading army seeks 
to conquer a foreign country, must henceforth be 
so hopelessly one-sided as to be entirely futile. 
The position of the late M. de Bloch has received 
ample confirmation during the course of the dis- 
tressing struggles of late years, in South Africa 
and the Philippine Islands, and the lesson of these 
conflicts is not likely to be missed. Entirely aside 
from the moral issues involved, both of these wars 
have borne out the essential assertion of M. de 
Bloch that a small body of men, armed with the 
modern means of defense, can resist, for an in- 
definite period, an invading body of overwhelm- 
ingly superior strength. In making this principle 



52 Various Views 

clear, it may well happen that these wars will 
prove to have been blessings in disguise, and that 
the last turning-point in the centuries may prove 
to have been a real turning-point in the history 
of mankind. 

A glance at the European situation seems to 
us also to offer reassuring signs. A few years ago 
a general conflict of the powers seemed inevitable, 
and it was doubtful whether the century would 
end without the precipitation of hostilities. To- 
day the danger seems far less imminent, and it 
looks as if the great international rivalries and 
jealousies might somehow be settled by peaceful 
means. There is the Hague Conference, for 
example. It is customary to speak slightingly of 
that remarkable gathering, but it was nevertheless 
symptomatic of the growing strength of cosmo- 
politan opinion. This is a factor in warfare which 
must henceforth be recognized, and, while it has 
not averted the deplorable wars of the last few 
years, it has made those responsible for them feel 
very uncomfortable. We have little doubt that 
the historian of the future will look back to the 
Tsar's eirenicon as to the beginning of a new era 
in international relations, and that the permanent 



International Amity 53 

tribunal which remains as the substantial result of 
the Hague Conference will be invoked more than 
once. 

The growing conviction of the impossibility of 
accomplishing by means of warfare what has been 
easily accomplished by the stronger force in past 
years is already acting as a quiet deterrent upon 
the minds of generals and statesmen. Cooperat- 
ing with this influence is the other influence which 
comes from the growth of international sympathies 
and the cementing of the bonds of friendship in 
many obtrusive and unobtrusive ways. There is 
a story afloat that Prince Henry of Prussia, our 
recent national guest, in an expansive moment said 
that he was having the time of his life in America, 
adding that when at home they only used him to 
send to funerals. Certainly a better use has been 
found for him than that, when his few days' stay 
in this country has been productive of so much 
good-will and mutual esteem between the two 
great nations concerned in the exchange of cour- 
tesies. When the surface-character of the visit, 
its pomp and its parade, shall have been forgotten, 
when the tumult and the shouting shall have died 
away, its symbolical character will remain as the 



54 Various Views 

one memorable thing about it, and will be likely 
to influence the relations between Germany and 
America for many years to come. The visit will 
remain a gracious memory long after the glitter of 
the event shall have grown dim in our recollection. 
Another recent event of similar significance 
was the visit of the Baron d'Estournelles de Con- 
stant, bearing the greetings of the great European 
Republic to its sister Republic in the West. This 
distinguished statesman, journeying from Paris to 
Chicago for the express purpose of paying a 
Frenchman's tribute to the memory of the greatest 
of Americans, pleaded in eloquent terms for the 
cause of international good-will, for the sinking of 
political jealousies and commercial rivalries in the 
larger interests of the common humanity of the 
race, and wherever he spoke his noble idealism — 
which is nevertheless that of a practical man of 
the world — aroused echoes of responsive sym- 
pathy in the breasts of his hearers. Now the 
influence which is represented by such visits as 
these, and supplemented by the many other 
modern agencies which tend to the creation of a 
mutual understanding between our own people 
and those of a foreign country, amounts in the 



International Amity 55 

total sum to an incalculably great force exerted 
in the interests of civilization and for the removal 
of ancient prejudice. Whenever men are brought 
together on the basis of a common interest, 
whether intellectual or social, the racial barriers 
first raised between them are at once cast down, 
and are as if they had never existed. Every inter- 
national gathering of men of politics, of science, 
or of literature, offers a silent but effective protest 
against the passions which set nations at war with 
one another. 

We do not expect that the world will be 
swayed by reason alone for many generations yet. 
Nevertheless, the ascendancy of reason is by slow 
degrees making itself felt. In spite of all dis- 
couragements, c man is being made,' in Tenny- 
son's phrase, and 

( Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the 
shade/ 

To the logical mind the outcome of the evolu- 
tionary process, however long-delayed, is sure. 
Such a mind must admit that even patriotism is 
selfishness, although at several removes from what 
we commonly call by that name. There is the 
selfishness of the individual, first of all, which has 



56 Various Views 

no redeeming quality. Then there is the selfish- 
ness of the family, in which the element of altruism 
first appears. Then there is the selfishness of the 
clan, the nation, and the race, and in each of these 
stages of the sentiment the altruistic character 
becomes more and more marked, until the clear 
thinker finds it impossible to believe that even 
race should set an absolute barrier to his sympa- 
thies, or that anything less than the whole of man- 
kind should be held in his affection. To take 
this final step to a complete altruism is, no doubt, 
to overcome the Mast infirmity of noble mind,' — 
no easy task, — yet was it not taken by a Roman 
freedman over two thousand years ago, and did 
not the audience in the Roman theatre greet 
with thunders of applause the famous line which 
declared that no man may remain unconcerned 
by aught that touches the interests of humanity 
at large ? 



Hero-Worship 57 



HERO-WORSHIP. 

Several years ago, Professor John W. Burgess 
made some suggestive remarks, which we are 
about to quote, upon the ethics of hero-worship. 
Their immediate application was to the American 
anti-slavery agitation and the John Brown cult, 
but they convey a lesson and a warning that 
should be taken to heart in connection with 
many other subjects, not only in the department 
of political history, but in all the fields of human 
endeavor. c I consider,' he said, c that the highest 
responsibility resting upon an historian is the 
right selection of those personalities which he 
holds up for the worship of after generations. 
The morals of the age are determined most 
largely by the character of its heroes. No 
amount of precept, religious or ethical, will have 
one tithe of the influence in forming the ideals 
of our youth that hero-worship possesses. If 
there is, then, one moment more solemn than 
another in the life of the historian, one when he 



58 Various Views 

should seek more earnestly than at another to be 
delivered from all prejudice, error, and weakness, 
it is when he essays the role of the hero-maker. 
If he fails in this, he may well question if all the 
other good he may have accomplished has not 
been over-balanced. There is a mawkish notion 
prevalent among the members of a certain very 
advanced class of people in almost all parts of the 
world, that if you add cant to crime you lessen the 
crime. Some of them think that the outcome of 
such a combination is the most heroic virtue. All 
of us judge crime more leniently when committed 
by persons who have views in common with us 
upon some important subject, and against persons 
whom we regard with feelings of hostility. But 
the moralist, the historian, and the inventor of 
epics are under bonds to civilization to rise above 
such weakness.' 

The false kind of sentiment that is here con- 
demned in such impressive terms has done much 
mischief in perverting the ethical judgments 
passed by mankind upon the conspicuous figures 
of history. In ancient times, it deified Alexander 
the Great and Julius Cssar, to say nothing of a 
long line of lesser conquerors and leaders of vie- 



Hero-Worship 59 

torious hosts. In our own century, it has made 
of Napoleon a subject for eulogy rather than for 
execration it has in a measure justified the career 
of the man of c blood and iron' who looms so 
large in the history of modern Germany, and it 
has recently been engaged in glossing over the 
unscrupulous methods of the ambitious adven- 
turer who came to regard South Africa as his 
own personal appanage. It would seem, indeed, 
when we consider these and the many similar 
cases which history presents to our view, that 
success, by whatever means achieved, is too often 
taken by the public as the adequate test of great- 
ness, and that a man's career passes for heroic if 
only it be sufficiently brilliant to attract wide- 
spread attention, and sufficiently daring to im- 
pose upon the imagination of men. The ethical 
philosopher, of course, bases his judgment upon 
other criteria than these, for he knows that failure 
is often more heroic than success, and that many 
a mute inglorious career, with which only the few 
are acquainted, may offer a finer example for the 
emulation of mankind than is offered by the lives 
of those who shine in the fierce light that beats 
upon the seats of the mighty. 



60 Various Views 

Carlyle has done much to glorify the type of 
man who succeeds by sheer strength of will, and 
the gospel of brute force has collected a singular 
company in his gallery of heroic figures. Yet it 
is from Carlyle himself that we have chosen a 
passage which emphasizes, better than it has often 
been emphasized, the eternal distinction between 
the strength that should command our admiration 
and the strength that is perversely employed. c A 
certain strong man, of former time, fought stoutly 
at Lepanto ; worked stoutly as Algerine slave ; 
stoutly delivered himself from such working \ 
with stout cheerfulness endured famine and na- 
kedness and the world's ingratitude • and sitting 
in jail, with the one arm left him, wrote our joy- 
fullest, and all but our deepest, modern book, and 
named it " Don Quijote ": this was a genuine 
strong man. A strong man, of recent time, fights 
little for any good cause anywhere \ works weakly 
as an English lord ; weakly delivers himself from 
such working ; with weak despondency endures 
the cackling of plucked geese at St. James \ and, 
sitting in sunny Italy, in his coach-and-four, at a 
distance of two thousand miles from them, w T rites, 
over many reams of paper, the following sentence, 



Hero-Worship 61 

with variations : " Saw ever the world one greater 
or unhappier?" This was a sham strong man. 
Choose ye.' While this comparison, in its strain- 
ing for antithetical effects, is not altogether fair 
to Byron, whose life was at least closed by a 
piece of genuine heroism, yet in the main it en- 
forces a lesson that should be taken to heart. 
The Byronic cult was undoubtedly in its day re- 
sponsible for a great deal of sickly sentimentalism, 
and its influence still lingers in English literature. 
As contrasted with Shelley's ardent and high- 
souled devotion to great causes and fine ideals, 
the passion of Byron at its best seems theatrical 
and insincere, and the gospel of c Childe Harold' 
is but a poor thing when viewed in the glowing 
light of the 4 Prometheus Unbound.' 

In literature, as in other departments of human 
activity, there are sham heroes as well as genuine 
ones. This statement is not meant to imply that a 
writer whose private life will not bear the closest 
scrutiny is for that reason unheroic as a literary 
figure, for the weakness of will by which per- 
sonal conduct is so often misshapen may coexist 
with an intellectual life of the rarest distinction. 
And since the essential thing about a writer is 



62 Various Views 

his work, he has a right to be judged by that 
work, almost irrespective of the life that lies be- 
hind it. The figure of Schopenhauer, for example, 
is one of the most heroic in literature, although 
the character of the man, as apart from the writer, 
left much to be desired. But the noble sincerity 
of his work, and its exaltation of fine ideals in 
both thought and conduct, are qualities so marked 
that we are quite justified in ignoring the unlovely 
aspects of the personal biography. On the other 
hand, the most conspicuous of literary figures may 
fail to assume heroic proportions if the work for 
which it stands have any suggestion of pose or 
insincerity. We may be very indulgent to the 
infirmities of the flesh, provided only they do not 
fetter or drag down the spirit. There is a false 
ring, which no sounding rhetoric can altogether 
deaden to the discerning ear, in the work of many 
masterful writers, and when that ring is once 
detected, the power of the voice to shape our in- 
tellectual ideals becomes sadly weakened. This 
false note may be caught over and over again in 
Byron ; it makes the Whitman cult seem a strange 
phenomenon to minds entirely well-balanced and 



Hero-Worship 63 

sane, and it lessens the effective appeal of even 
such giants as Hugo and Carlvle. 

When we think of certain figures in literature 
as peculiarly heroic, we do not usuallv stop for 
analysis, but are content to rest the judgment 
upon a mixture of impressions, in part derived 
from the life, and in part from the work. Scott 
and Balzac are good examples of this, for both 
are heroic figures in a very genuine sense, and 
we hardly know whether to admire them the 
more for their courageous struggle against adverse 
material conditions or for their resolute pursuit 
of a great creative purpose. Instead of taking 
these men for our illustration, let us take instead 
a man who was a hero of literature pure and 
simple, a man whose career has for the literary 
worker the same sort of lessons that the career 
of Spinoza has for the philosopher, of Gordon 
for the soldier, or of Mazzini for the statesman. 
The man is Gustave Flaubert, and our task is 
made easy by borrowing from an eloquent address 
made at Oxford by Al. Paul Bourget. c No man 
was ever more richly endowed with the higher 
virtues of a great literary artist/ says M. Bourget. 



64 Various Views 

4 His whole existence was one long struggle 
against circumstances and against himself, to live 
up to that ideal standard as a writer which he 
had set before himself from his earliest years. 
. . . He remains ever present among us, in spite 
of the new developments assumed by contempo- 
rary French literature, for he gave to all writers 
the most splendid example of passionate, exclusive 
love of literature. With his long years of patient 
and scrupulous toil, his noble contempt of w 7 ealth, 
honours, and popularity, with his courage in pur- 
suing to the end the realization of his dream, he 
looms upon us an intellectual hero.' 

And yet with all his passion for the impersonal, 
with all his striving to view life from the outside, 
holding, or at least expressing, ' no form of creed, 
but contemplating all, 5 the final lesson of Flau- 
bert's life is, as his eulogist admits, that no man 
may wholly exclude himself from his writings. 
Had the author of c Madame Bovary ' really done 
so, c they would not have reached us all imbued 
with that melancholy savour, that subdued pathos 
which makes them so dear to us. . . , This 
gift of expressing in their writings more than 
they themselves suspect, and of achieving results 



Hero-Worship 65 

exceeding their ambition, is only granted to those 
courageous and sincere geniuses whose past trials 
have gained for them the priceless treasure of wide 
experience. Thus did Cervantes write " Don 
Quijote," and Defoe " Robinson Crusoe," little 
dreaming that they infused into their writings, the 
former all the glowing heroism of Spain, the latter 
the dogged self-reliance of the Anglo-Saxon. If 
they had not themselves for many years practised 
these virtues of chivalrous enterprise in the one 
case, of indomitable endurance in the other, their 
books would have been what they intended them 
to be — mere tales of adventure. But their souls 
were greater than their art, and imbued it through- 
out with that symbolic power which is the efficient 
vitality of books. In the same way Flaubert's 
soul was greater than his art, and it is that soul 
which, in spite of his own will, he breathed into 
his writings, gaining for them a place apart in the 
history of the contemporary French novel.' Thus 
we come back, after all, to the position that 
heroism in literary production is somehow the 
outcome or reflex of something heroic in the 
character and the temper of the writer. It may 
be only a streak, so blended with others as to be 



66 Various Views 

almost undiscernible to observers of the man apart 
from his books, yet it is the deepest and truest 
part of him, and a noble book of any sort may 
well give pause to the judgment that too hastily 
condemns a man's life because it is visibly flawed. 
But those men are the fittest subjects for hero- 
worship in whom the life and the word are the 
most fully consonant, whose lives are poems, and 
whose words are acts. Such a hero was Goethe, 
with his lifelong devotion to the ideal that held 
the whole of life to be even more important than 
its separate elements of the good and the beau- 
tiful ; such was Milton, whose c soul was like a 
star, and dwelt apart,' and yet whose heart c the 
lowliest duties on herself did lay '; such was 
Dante, whose exiled soul still c possessed the sun 
and stars,' and whose divine poem was wrought 
not as a poem merely, but 

1 With close heed 
Lest, having spent for the work's sake 
Six days, the man be left to make.' 



A Philistine Watchword 67 



A PHILISTINE WATCHWORD. 

Readers of c The International Journal of Eth- 
ics ' must have rubbed their eyes when they 
received a certain number of that earnest and 
valuable review, and found its first score of pages 
devoted to the great achievement of Dr. Nansen 
in Arctic exploration. What has such a matter 
to do with ethics ? they may well have asked, and 
why should our attention be diverted to the deeds 
of this hardy Norseman when all our intellectual 
energies are needed for the examination of such 
engaging subjects as c the relation of pessimism 
to ultimate philosophy,' and c our social and ethical 
solidarity,' and c the history and spirit of Chinese 
ethics,' to instance a few of the themes discussed 
within the same covers. The fact that Mr. Leslie 
Stephen was responsible for this diversion gave 
promise, indeed, of a high degree of intellectual 
entertainment ; but one had to get well along into 
the essay before discovering what Dr. Nansen 
was really doing in this galley. The name of the 



68 Various Views 

writer was, of course, sufficient to warrant the 
conclusion that the choice of subject would prove 
to be justified, even for the purposes of a 'jour- 
nal of ethics'; and the event showed that some 
of the deepest matters underlying the general 
problem of conduct might be involved in the story 
of the explorer and the stanch ship that drifted 
with the northern ice-cap across the circumpolar 
seas. 

There is, to put it bluntly, no ethical problem 
of greater importance than that which emerges 
from the consideration of just such activities as 
were so magnificently displayed by the expedition 
of Dr. Nansen. It is the fundamental problem 
of utilitarianism, and the most searching analysis 
is needed before we can hope to straighten it out. 
Into all discussions of this problem the philistine 
shibboleth of the c practical ' forces its way, and 
puts such questions as these: c Is it not wrong to 
admire men whose fine qualities run more or less 
to waste ; or, if that cannot be said, that might 
have been applied to some purpose of more im- 
portance to the welfare of mankind ? To admire 
simplicity, daring, vigor, and good comradeship, 
is of course right ; but ought we not, it may be 



A Philistine Watchword 69 

asked, to regret all the more their devotion of 
these virtues to inadequate ends ? ' 

Mr. Stephen finds no difficulty in answering 
these questions to the confutation of their Philis- 
tine proponent. c You admit,' he says to the 
short-sighted utilitarian who can see nothing 
beyond the immediate consequences of a given 
display of effort, c you admit in some sense that 
the main end of conduct should be to promote 
the greatest happiness of the greatest number; 
and yet the precepts which you deduce from your 
principles seem to imply a colorless monotony 
and a life uncheered by any pursuits enjoyable in 
themselves.' Grouping the work of Arctic ex- 
peditions with other scientific work, and with art 
and literature, as constituting all together a sort 
of 4 play,' he says : c The justification for play, 
if we may call that play which involves most 
strenuous labor, must take a different ground. 
One ground is that the energy which has had 
no directly utilitarian aim has been of most essen- 
tial service to mankind ; that, if the world has im- 
proved even in the sense of being able to support 
a larger population in moderate comfort, the im- 
provement has been owing not simply nor perhaps 



70 Various Views 

chiefly to those who have consciously labored to 
redress grievances and remove causes of misery, 
but to men who have pursued intellectual aims, 
scientific or artistic, for the pure love of art or 
science.' And he concludes by saying that c the 
true doctrine seems to be that it is an imperative 
duty for a man to devote his intellect to those 
purposes, whatever they may be, to which it is 
most fitted.' 

The spokesmen of the 4 practical ' have done 
so much in all ages, and are still doing so much, 
to chill enthusiasms and to narrow the scope of 
life, that we make no apology for recurring to this 
well-worn theme, and pointing out once more the 
essential misconception of those well-intentioned 
but purblind persons. c Why was this waste of 
the ointment made ? ' is a question that we hear 
repeated, in various disguises, every day of our 
lives. Now there are two satisfactory answers 
to the question in all of its forms : one of them 
faces the utilitarian critic upon his own plane 
and leaves him no ground upon which to stand, 
while the other makes the radical demand that he 
broaden his conception of utility and rearrange 
his notions of conduct in accordance with a far 



A Philistine Watchword 71 

finer envisagement of the purpose of human life. 
The first answer is the one more commonly 
made. Mr. Stephen^ for example, makes it in 
these words : ' Knowledge can scarcely be ad- 
vanced in anv direction without throwing light 
upon knowledge in general ; and the devotion of 
some men of great powers to minute and appar- 
ently remote interests is really to be admired 
because it constantly leads to unforeseen and 
important results.' The history of science is 
so filled with illustrations of this truth that we 
hardly know where to begin in making a selec- 
tion. Take almost any of the achievements of 
applied science and trace the underlying ideas 
back to their genesis in the brain of some devoted 
investigator, or, reversing the process, take from 
the annals of the history of science any idea that 
has proved fertile and show what extremely prac- 
tical results have grown out of it, and, in which- 
ever way we construct the genealogy of our 
chosen idea, we shall be filled with wonder at its 
consequences, and made to realize that such con- 
sequences must, in the very nature of things, be 
largely or wholly unforeseen when the idea first 
springs to birth. How useless, to all seeming, 



72 Various Views 

were the early studies of micro-organisms, — 
and yet these studies laid the foundation for the 
vast benefactions of Pasteur and made a reality 
of the long-cherished dream of a rational theory 
of disease. Or how could Oersted, or the most 
keen-sighted of his contemporaries, have foreseen 
that his discovery of the deflection of the mag- 
netic needle by the galvanic current was to make 
possible all the countless applications of electric- 
ity to our modern life ? In view of such facts as 
these, how childish it is to ask of every new con- 
tribution to knowledge that it at once justify its 
existence by doing something for man's material 
comfort, and how benighted must be his mental 
condition who scorns every new scientific truth 
that may not at once be put to some practical 
use. And, to return to the immediate theme of 
this discourse, the man stands intellectually self- 
condemned who is rash enough to assert that the 
deep-sea soundings or the magnetic and meteor- 
ological observations made by the Nansen expe- 
dition may not in the future prove to have fur- 
nished a necessary link in the chain of reasoning 
whereby some vast new gift shall be bestowed by 
science upon human life. 



A Philistine Watchword 73 

Strong as appears, however, the argument 
above outlined, and amply sufficient as it is to 
answer the cut bono? of the Philistine critic, we 
are not content to rest upon it the case for science. 
For there always underlies the discussion of this 
subject a source of misunderstanding that is rarely 
probed. The respective champions of science 
and of utilitarianism may be using the same 
words, but they are not speaking the same lan- 
guage. In employing the terms which they 
bandy about so freely — such terms, for example, 
as c use,' c benefit,' and 'practical value' — they 
are nearly always playing at cross-purposes, and 
the one seldom understands what the other really 
means. Why is one thing more practical than 
another? The only possible answer is that it 
contributes more directly to the satisfaction of 
some desire. But how great is the arrogance 
of those who single out certain desires of a sort 
relating almost wholly to matters of material 
comfort, and assume that those desires alone are 
worthy of being gratified at the cost of any effort. 
Is a desire to be scorned because it does not 
happen to be entertained by the majority of un- 
thinking people, and is the quality of a desire to 



74 Various Views 

count for nothing in this calculus of ethical val- 
ues? And if we take quality into the reckoning, 
does not the advancement of knowledge minister 
to the best of all desires ? The search after truth 
is an end in itself, and nothing can be more 
practical, in any sense of the term worth consid- 
ering, than the prosecution of that high quest. 
To think God's thoughts seemed to Kepler a 
worthy employment for his best intellectual en- 
ergies, and 

* To follow knowledge like a sinking star 
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought/ 

seemed to the master-singer of our own age the 
noblest of all aims. It is by just the extent to 
which man is capable of entertaining such ideal 
ambitions that he is lifted above the beast of the 
fields, and the humanity is in pitiable case that 
can scorn any sincere effort to strengthen the 
foundations of the temple of human knowledge 
or bear its dome still further skyward. 



A Question of Conscience 75 



A QUESTION OF LITERARY 
CONSCIENCE. 

There are few chapters of literary criticism that 
surpass, in display of subtle insight and essential 
justice of conclusion, the well-known essay of 
Charles Lamb upon the artificial comedy of the 
Restoration. This essay has always been a 
stumbling-block to the Philistine, and will always 
appear paradoxical to the reader whose intellect- 
ual perceptions do not nicely balance his moral 
prepossessions. Macaulay, as we know, found 
it both a paradox and a stumbling-block, and as- 
sailed it with the weaver's beam that he wielded 
with such redoubtable energy. But in spite of 
the attack of Macaulay, and of other persons 
defective in their literary sympathies, the ideas 
advanced by Lamb in this essay have held their 
own, and criticism has accepted their funda- 
mental validity. It will be remembered that 
Lamb's argument runs, in substance, to the effect 
that the writers whom he defends created a con- 



76 Various Views 

ventional world of their own, in which the rules 
that ordinarily govern, and properly should gov- 
ern, human conduct, have no more application 
than the rules of ordinary probability to the inci- 
dents of a Grimm Mahrchen or an Arabian tale. 
Lamb declared himself c glad for a season to take 
an airing beyond the diocese of the strict con- 
science,' and now and then c for a dream-while 
or so, to imagine a world with no meddling re- 
strictions.' The world of Congreve and Wych- 
erley l is altogether a speculative scene of things, 
which has no reference whatever to the world 
that is. . . . The whole is a passing pageant, 
where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, 
for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and 
mice.' His complaint is that people no longer 
take delight in the pageant, because they have 
grown too strenuous in their literal-minded inter- 
pretation of the show. c Like Don Quixote, we 
take part against the puppets, and quite as im- 
pertinently.' We are too self-conscious to give 
ourselves up to mere distraction, and go to the 
theatre not c to escape from the pressure of reality 
so much as to confirm our experience of it; to 
make assurance double, and take a bond of fate.' 



A Question of Conscience 77 

The fashion of the Restoration comedy is one 
that has now passed away from popular interest, 
but another fashion has taken its place, concern- 
ing which Lamb's argument is equally to the 
point. This is the fashion of romantic fiction, 
toward which our strenuous moralists are apt to 
assume a deprecatory attitude, upon much the 
same grounds that served as a basis for the 
condemnation of the earlier fashion. Romantic 
fiction is essentially unreal, we are told ; it does 
not reflect the conditions of actual life, it en- 
courages us to dream instead of setting us face 
to face with the problems of human existence, 
it dissipates our energies instead of enlisting them 
in behalf of worthy social and intellectual causes. 
The charge is doubtless true, but is there no 
place for dreams in the economy of the spiritual 
life? Are we to reject the ministry of every 
form of literature that takes us away from our 
surroundings, or is not closely related to our im- 
mediate pursuits and interests ? Entertainment 
may not be the highest mission of literature, but 
it is surely a legitimate object for a writer to set 
before himself, and those writers who offer en- 
tertainment, in whatever fashion the hour may 



78 Various Views 

approve, are not undeserving of the public and 
will not find their efforts unrewarded. To say 
that romantic fiction moves in an unreal world 
of its own making should not be held a matter for 
reproach j it should rather be recognized as the 
necessary condition of this form of art, and should 
make us grateful for the refuge which it ofFers 
to the mind oppressed by the burden, at times so 
intolerable, of the actual world. The art of fic- 
tion depends upon conventions quite as fully as 
does the dramatic art. The action must be com- 
pressed far beyond the limits of probability, and 
worked out with small regard for the many dis- 
turbing influences by which it would certainly 
be complicated in real life. The villain must 
be foiled, the hero must triumph, and the lovers 
must be united, even if there are only a score of 
pages in which to accomplish all these things. 
Whatever the length of the story, these are its 
fundamental requirements \ and to such ends all 
the means employed by the writer must be bent. 
Each separate scene, moreover, must be height- 
ened in effect far beyond anything that is likely 
to occur in everyday life ; two people seated side 
by side at a dinner-table must make their con- 



A Question of Conscience 79 

versaticn more brilliant than any that was ever 
actually heard upon such an occasion ; the mem- 
bers of every group of persons brought into con- 
tact for the purposes of the narrative must say 
and do just the right things at the right moments, 
instead of floundering about in act and speech 
as they doubtless would in the haphazard actual 
world. In that world, as the poet reminds us, 
we get 4 never the time and the place and the 
loved one all together '; but in the world which 
the romantic imagination creates we have a right 
to expect this conjunction, and a reason for jus- 
tifiable disappointment if it is missed. 

The romance of pure adventure appeals to 
some of our healthiest instincts. Both as boys 
and as men, we like to follow the fortunes of 
pirates, to read about shipwrecks and all other 
sorts of forlorn hopes, and to applaud the deeds 
of heroes who slay their enemies right and left, 
and escape from the most desperate dangers by 
feats of improbable prowess and display of in- 
domitable if not superhuman valor. The gen- 
tlest spirits as well as the most fiery delight in 
these things, and delight in them precisely because 
they are so far removed from ordinary human 



80 Various Views 

experience. They are the happenings of a world 
which, at least when we have outgrown boyhood, 
we have no desire to make our own, a world 
which could not be our own if we wished it, a 
world which we frankly recognize as imagined 
for our diversion. We should ill requite those 
who purvey for us all this innocent entertainment 
were we to arraign them before the bar of con- 
science, to make stern inquiry into the probability 
of their imaginings, and to pronounce upon the 
conduct of their characters such severe judg- 
ments as would doubtless await such conduct in 
the courts of justice of our prosaic world. 

Nevertheless, although we are fully persuaded 
of the right of romantic fiction to exist and of its 
heroes to perform acts which would not bear the 
test of a prosaic and conventional morality, we 
are not without certain searchings of soul when 
we contemplate the enormous vogue enjoyed by 
this species of literature at the present day. Of 
that vogue there can be no question. It would 
be difficult to point to any earlier period in which 
popular fiction was so largely made up of tales 
of adventure, tales whose interest centres upon 
exploits rather than principles, upon the triumph 



A Question of Conscience 81 

of the individual will rather than of the abstract 
ideal. There is an appalling amount of blood- 
shed in our popular romance, and an almost un- 
exampled degree of recklessness in the choice of 
means for the desired end. One need not be a 
professional moralist to correlate this illustration 
of popular taste with the wave of brutality which 
seems to be sweeping over our civilization, and 
which threatens to submerge the moral territory 
that has been reclaimed at so great a cost of in- 
dividual and collective effort. For some reason 
or other, the finer instincts of civilization seem 
of late years to have become dulled, and both 
individuals and nations are suffered without effect- 
ive protest to commit acts which should arouse 
the fiercest indignation for their contravention of 
all the principles bv w T hich nations achieve true 
greatness and individuals bequeath to their de- 
scendants a heritage of honorable fame. We 
should hardlv include our popular literature 
among; the active causes of this degenerative 
process, but it may not be unfair to regard it as 
symptomatic. We may read with zest the pop- 
ular literature which glories in brute force, and 
we may get no harm from it as individuals ; but 



82 Various Views 

we must c view with alarm,' as the political plat- 
forms say, the ever-increasing hold which this 
species of literature is gaining upon the popular 
mind. If such literature does not directly shape 
the actions of men, it certainly does to some 
extent reflect their ideals, and its present prom- 
inence is such as to confront the literary con- 
science with a serious question. Should we, 
because they afford us such admirable enter- 
tainment, give our unqualified approval to these 
writings that glorify all the brutal passions, that 
move in a world unswayed by the moral law, 
and that substitute for the Christian precepts a 
gospel whereof Carlyle and Nietzsche are the 
evangelists ? It is a serious question, whether 
the ideals of public and private morality, as re- 
flected in the popular literature of the day, which 
the century has just passed on to the present, 
will bear a favorable comparison with those which 
were bequeathed to the last century by its pre- 
decessor. 



The Artist and the Man 83 



THE ARTIST AND THE MAN. 

Among the many principles for which the late 
John Ruskin contended with all the force of 
his impassioned and vehement eloquence, there 
is one which occupies a peculiarly significant 
position. It is the principle that a man's art 
and a man's character are so mutually dependent 
that the latter is implicit in the former. This 
principle is central in the great critic's doctrine, 
for it supplies the nexus whereby his ethics and 
his aesthetics become united into a single body 
of teaching. It affords the justification for his 
constant injection of moral questions into his 
discussions of art, and for his persistent employ- 
ment of artistic illustrative material in his treat- 
ment of the problems that relate to the conduct 
of life. The principle in question finds its typi- 
cal expression in such sentences as these : c The 
faults of a work of art are the faults of its work- 
man, and its virtues his virtues.' c Great art is 
the expression of the mind of a great man, and 



84 Various Views 

mean art, that of the want of mind of a weak 
man.' 'And always, from the least to the great- 
est, as the made thing is good or bad, so is the 
maker of it.' c When once you have learned 
how to spell those most precious of all legends, 
— pictures and buildings, — you may read the 
characters of men, and of nations, in their art, 
as in a mirror ; — nay, as in a microscope, 
and magnified a hundredfold ; for the character 
becomes passionate in the art, and intensifies 
itself in all its noblest or meanest delights.' Fi- 
nally, the doctrine of these pronouncements 
receives summing-up in the following impressive 
fashion : a Of all facts concerning art, this is 
the one most necessary to be known, that, while 
manufacture is the work of hands only, art is 
the work of the whole spirit of man ; and as that 
spirit is, so is the deed of it ; and by whatever 
power of vice or virtue any art is produced, the 
same vice or virtue it reproduces and teaches.' 

There are many impulsive sayings to be found 
in the forty or fifty volumes of Ruskin, many 
opinions too clearly born of a moment's intellect- 
ual caprice to be deserving of more than a mo- 
ment's attention, but these which we have quoted 



The Artist and the Man 85 

do not belong to that category. Thev are rather 
the deliberate records of a lifelong belief, time 
and time again solemnly reaffirmed, and funda- 
mental to a comprehension of the whole structure 
of their author's thought. That the proposition 
which they embody has been vigorously denied 
is matter of common intelligence among* those 
familiar with the currents of critical discussion 
during the past half-century or more. The doc- 
trine of c art for art's sake ' falls to pieces unless 
we reject the notion that the character of the 
artist is reflected in his work. That doctrine 
has exerted a strong influence upon criticism, 
and there was a time, not so many years ago, 
when it seemed to hold the field against its op- 
ponents. If we consider the case of literary art 
alone, there were two excellent reasons for the 
apparent ascendancy of this opinion in the forum 
of aesthetical controversy. The first was offered 
by the fact that didacticism in literature had 
been greatly overdone. When we think of the 
long and dreary annals of allegorical composition 
and sermonizing in verse, we naturally revolt 
from the assumption that this sort of activity 
has anything to do with literature proper, and 



86 Various Views 

it gives us a sense of satisfaction to take refuge 
in even the extreme opinion that poetry has 
no business to teach anything, that its message 
is one of pure beauty, and that, by just so much 
as it departs from this aim, its purpose becomes 
weakened, and its spiritual power impaired. 
The second reason which seemed to justify the 
principle of c art for art's sake' was offered by 
those over-zealous critics of literature who were 
constantly dragging petty personalities into their 
work, raising a great pother over the superficial 
aspects of a poet's private life, and making out 
of some carelessness of habit or fault of temper a 
structural defect in character which must always 
be kept in the foreground of thought when the 
poet's work was under consideration. It was 
no wonder that these two influences combined 
drove many sensitive intelligences to the ex- 
treme of revolt. The fact that, on the one hand, 
such didacticism as Young's c Night Thoughts ' 
and Pollok's c Course of Time ' could pass for 
poetry at all, and that, on the other, whole sec- 
tions of the reading public should be warned 
against the poetry of Byron and Shelley because 
their lives did not square with the social conven- 



The Artist and the Man 87 

tions of their time — this twofold fact, we say, 
based upon a false perspective and a complete 
misunderstanding of the poetic art, was amply 
sufficient to account for the success of a form 
of teaching whose fundamental object was to 
restore to poetry the dignity which it seemed to 
be in danger of losing. 

When, however, we come to take a broader 
view of the whole question, it must be admitted 
that the doctrine of c art for art's sake,' the doc- 
trine that the artist must deliberately eschew the 
intention of teaching, that, if he have the divine 
fire within him, the purity of its glow will remain 
undimmed whatever the life he may lead, is 
almost as narrow as the doctrine against which 
it was raised in protest. Because certain dull 
poets have been offensively didactic we have no 
right to say that poets of genius may not engage 
their powers in the furtherance of worthy ideals. 
That some great poets have had personal failings, 
about which their critics have been more curious 
than was necessary, is no reason why we should 
deny that, other things being equal, the blameless 
life will in the long run express itself in nobler 
forms than the life that has not escaped 'the 



88 Various Views 

contagion of the world's slow stain.' As far as 
the latter of these two propositions is concerned, 
we take a just pride in the thought that Milton 
and Tennyson were no less great as men than as 
poets, and, while giving full acceptance as poetry 
to the work of men whose character we may not 
call unblemished, it would distinctly add to our 
satisfaction could we know them to have lived 
lives in stricter consonance with their ideals. As 
for the former proposition, we need only point to 
the long line of great poets who have allied their 
work with the practical human causes of reli- 
gious and ethical teaching, of political and social 
progress. From the defence of the Areopagus 
and the old conservative order by iEschylus to 
the denunciation by Hugo of the saturnalia of 
a bastard French imperialism, the most famous 
of poets have ever been ready — have found 
themselves irresistibly impelled — to make their 
work tell in the never-ending struggle between 
truth and error, between right and wrong, be- 
tween the conservative and the destructive 
agencies in the life of the social organism. 

How does our star-like Milton serve to illu- 
minate the doctrine of c art for art's sake ' ? It is 



The Artist and the Man 89 

true that he turned from serene verse to stormy 
prose in his championship of the struggling 
Puritan Commonwealth, but it is also true that 
when he turned again to verse his thought took 
on a new majesty, and that the deepest feelings 
of puritanism are to be found rather in his epics 
than in his polemics. Surely, our literature has 
no nobler art than that of the c Paradise Lost/ 
but was the poem written for 'art's sake 'alone? 
Not unless we take c art's sake ' and c life's sake' 
to be synonymous, which they probably are, if 
our definitions be made sufficiently liberal. In 
the final synthesis, beauty and truth and virtue 
are one and the same thing, and the 'art's sake' 
shibboleth appears but a question-begging phrase. 
We cannot judge the artist without in large 
measure judging the man as well, for as Pro- 
fessor Corson says, speaking of such poets as 
Milton, c their personalities and their works are 
consubstantial.' But we may easily make the 
mistake — and often do make it — of basing our 
estimate of a poet's character too much upon the 
trivial outward aspects of his life, and too little 
upon the writings in which his inmost self stands 
clearly revealed. If his actions and his books 



go Various Views 

give each other the lie, why should we jump to 
the conclusion that the written expression of 
character must be insincere ; why not take the 
more reasonable view that the true personality 
is to be sought in the books ? They, at least, 
if read aright, offer a form of self-expression 
that is deliberate and clear ; while a man's daily 
actions are impulsive and open to a hundred 
misinterpretations. 

Again writing of Milton, Professor Corson 
says : c His personality is felt in his every pro- 
duction, poetical and prose, and felt almost as 
much in the earliest as in the latest period of his 
authorship. And there is no epithet more ap- 
plicable to his own personality than the epithet 
august. He is therefore one of the most edu- 
cating of authors, in the highest sense of the 
word, that is, educating in the direction of sanc- 
tified character.' What is here said of Milton 
we believe to be equally true of Shakespeare. 
We all know what Wordsworth said of the 
sonnet, that c with this key Shakespeare unlocked 
his heart,' how Browning replied to this dictum 
with an indignant, c If so, the less Shakespeare 



The Artist and the Man 91 

he,' and how Matthew Arnold, in a vein similar 
to that of Browning, wrote these lines : 

« Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
We ask and ask — Thou smilest and art still, 
Out-topping knowledge.'* 

In this conflict of opinion, it seems to us that 
Wordsworth has expressed the deeper truth. It 
is true that the closest scrutiny of Shakespeare's 
work will not give us the facts about his boyish 
poaching upon Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, or 
explain the mystery of that 'second-best bed' 
bequeathed to his wife. But the knowledge of 
a man's personality does not depend upon such 
trivialities as these. We know his qualities of 
heart and mind better than we know those of 
our closest friends. We know what he thought 
upon most serious subjects, and how he felt 
about human life in its most significant aspects. 
The superstition which would have us believe 
that, as a dramatist, he exhibited the personali- 
ties of his created characters and concealed his 
own beyond any possibility of surmise has been 
tenacious, but is at last losing its hold upon 
intelligent students. The little book of Mr. 



92 Various Views 

Frank Harris upon the man Shakespeare, and 
the still more recent book of Professor Goldwin 
Smith upon the same subject, are interesting 
records of the change of opinion upon this sub- 
ject. Still more interesting is the closing para- 
graph of the important work of Shakespearian 
criticism which we owe to Dr. Brandes : 

* The William Shakespeare who was born at Stratford- 
on-Avon in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who lived and 
wrote in London in her reign and that of James, who 
ascended into heaven in his comedies and descended into 
hell in his tragedies, and died at the age of fifty-two in 
his native town, rises a wonderful personality in grand 
and distinct outlines, with all the vivid coloring of life 
from the pages of his books, before the eyes of all who 
read them with an open, receptive mind, with sanity of 
judgment, and simple susceptibility to the power of 
genius.'' 



The Duties of Authors 93 



THE DUTIES OF AUTHORS. 

That every right implies a correlated duty, and 
that the assertion of the one should be con- 
ditioned upon the acceptance of the other, is a 
principle in which theoretical is more common 
than practical acquiescence. The burden of 
Mazzini's criticism of the French Revolution 
was that it gave undue prominence to the Rights 
of Man, and had little to say about the corre- 
sponding Duties of Man. It was the funda- 
mental aim of that patient, heroic soul to mor- 
alize the European revolutionary movement by 
insisting upon the claim of duty as a necessary 
accompaniment of the claim of right. 

Transferring the discussion from the political 
to the literary plane, we are inclined to think 
that too much has lately been heard about the 
rights of authors in comparison with what is 
said about their duties. It is then with peculiar 
satisfaction that we call attention to the chapter 
on c The Duties of Authors' included in Mr. 



94 Various Views 

Leslie Stephen's collection of addresses to eth- 
ical societies. While Sir Walter Besant and his 
associates in the Society of Authors are engaged 
in the praiseworthy work of exposing the wily 
ways of the dishonest publisher, it is well that a 
strong voice should now and then discourse upon 
the responsibilities of authorship, and sound a note 
of warning against the temptations which beset 
the man of letters under the modern commercial 
literary regime. The ethics of literature is a large 
subject with many ramifications, and neither Mr. 
Stephen nor any other man could hope to treat 
of it exhaustively within the limits of a single 
essay ; but the address to which reference is 
now made touches upon the more salient fea- 
tures of the subject, and is characterized in 
unusual measure by good sense, sound logic, and 
fine ethical tone. 

So large a proportion of literary energy now- 
adays is absorbed by journalism that no discus- 
sion of the duties of authors can ignore the work 
of those who write for the newspaper press. It 
is in journalism, also, that writers are most 
strongly assailed by the temptations peculiar to 
their craft. The question of anonymity, for 



The Duties of Authors 95 

example, is one that must be considered in its 
ethical relations, and it takes the keenest self- 
searching for a man to be sure that under the 
impersonal shelter of the plural pronoun he is 
not saying things to which he would blush to 
attach his signature. Nothing is more con- 
temptible than the work of the writer w T ho 
makes himself a hireling of some party organ, 
and earns his daily bread by the advocacy of 
doctrines to which he does not personally sub- 
scribe; doctrines that are abhorrent to him as 
an individual. Such a prostitution of literary 
talent may be defended, is defended, in many 
ingenious ways, but the cobwebs of sophistry 
woven about the discussion by defenders of this 
practice are easily swept away by anyone who is 
determined to see things as they are and regulate 
his conduct in accordance with the fundamental 
principles of morality. The stock argument by 
which lawyers justify their defence of the crimi- 
nal of whose guilt they are convinced — the plea 
that such a person is entitled to the most favor- 
able interpretation of which the law admits, and 
that someone must secure it for him — is not 
valid in the discussion of questions of public 



96 Various Views 

interest. No matter of governmental policy is 
entitled to any other defence than may be made 
for it by those who honestly believe in its advis- 
ability ; for those who disbelieve in it, yet enlist 
their powers in its behalf, no condemnation can 
be too strong. The first duty of the citizen is 
to further what he honestly believes to be the 
real interests of the state, and, if his activity take 
the special form of argument through the medium 
of the press, to be sure that his public utterances 
tally with his private opinions. To repudiate 
this obligation is to act the part of traitor, and 
in a more dangerous, because a more insidious, 
way than that of the leader of an armed revolt. 
4 To thine own self be true ' is a precept that 
journalists, more than most other people, need 
to keep in mind. 

Anonymity doubtless serves as a shelter for 
much of the baseness that we are reprobating ; 
yet historically, Mr. Stephen tells us, it is rather 
the effect than the cause. 

* According to a well-known anecdote, two writers 
of the eighteenth century decided by the toss of a half- 
penny which should write for Walpole and which should 
write for his adversary Pulteney 5 but the choice was 
generally decided by less reputable motives. Now, so 



The Duties of Authors 97 

long as the press meant such a class it was of course 
natural that the trade should be regarded as discredit- 
able, and should be carried on by men who had less 
care for their character than for their pockets. In En- 
gland, where our development has been continuous and 
traditions linger long, the sentiment long survived $ and 
the practice which corresponded to it — the practice, 
that is, of anonymity — has itself survived the sentiment 
which gave it birth.' 

Mr. Stephen then goes on to say : 

* The mask was formerly worn by men who were 
ashamed of their employment, and who had the same 
reasons for anonymity as a thief or an anarchist may 
have for a disguise. It may now be worn even by men 
who are proud of their profession, because the mask has 
a different significance. , 

This latter statement is to a considerable extent 
true, but we are far from sure that the senti- 
ment is dead that gave birth to anonymity, or 
that great numbers of journalists to-day do not 
write what they are told to write, and paid for 
writing, irrespective of their own convictions. 

Anonymity has other dangers than the major 
one of making men false to themselves. It 
affords, for example, c obvious conveniences to 
a superficial omniscience.' Mr. Stephen remarks 
with genial humor: 

' The young gentleman who dogmatizes so early might 



98 Various Views 

blush if he had to sign his name to his audacious utter- 
ances. His tone of infallibility would be absurd if we 
knew who was the pope that was promulgating dogmas. 
The man in a mask professes to detect at a glance the 
absurd sophistries which impose upon the keenest con- 
temporary intellects ; but if he doffed the mask and 
appeared as young Mr. Smith, or Jones, who took his 
degree last year, we might doubt whether he had a 
right to assume so calmly that the sophistry is all on the 
other side.' 

The one safe rule seems to be that the anony- 
mous writer c should say nothing when he speaks 
in the plural which would make him look silly 
if he used the first person singular.' The man 
who should follow this rule, and who should 
refrain from allowing any personal feeling to 
invade his judgments of other men and their 
works, might safely be trusted to write unsigned 
articles by the score, and, if he remained all the 
while true to his convictions, could not fairly be 
charged with falling short of the whole duty of 
authorship. 

Another temptation that besets the author 
is that of being content to follow current opin- 
ion, instead of doing his best to aid in its forma- 
tion. c There is an old story,' says Mr. Stephen, 
1 which tells how a certain newspaper used to 



The Duties of Authors 99 

send out an emissary to discover what was the 
common remark that everyone was making in 
omnibuses and club smoking-rooms, and to 
fashion it into next morning's article for the 
instruction of mankind. The echo affected to set 
the tune which it really repeated.' One of the 
most obvious duties of authorship is that of hav- 
ing something of your own to say, and of pre- 
paring yourself by strenuous effort to say it in 
the most direct and forcible manner. There is 
a great deal more of 'facile writing' than there 
was half a century ago, but it is doubtful if 
there is any more writing of the first-rate sort, 
c which speaks of a full mind and strong convic- 
tions, which is clear because it is thorough.' 
This phase of the question of duty as it relates 
to authors could not be better put than in the 
following passage: 

6 1 have been struck in reading newspaper articles, 
even my own, by the curious loss of individuality which 
a man seems to suffer as a writer. Unconsciously the 
author takes the color of his organ $ he adopts not only- 
its sentiment but its style, and seems to become a mere 
transmitter of messages, with whose substance he has no 
more to do than the wires of the electric telegraph which 
carries them. But now and then we suddenly come 
across something fresh and original ; we know by instinct 

LofC. 



ioo Various Views 

that we are being addressed by another man, and are in 
a living relation to a separate human being, not to a mere 
drilled characterless unit of a disciplined army 5 we find 
actually thoughts, convictions, arguments, which, though 
all arguments are old, have evidently struck the writer's 
mind, and not merely been transmitted into his pen ; 
and then we may know that we are in the presence of a 
real force, and meeting with a man who is doing his 
duty.* 

Mr. Stephen's exposition of his theme is so 
attractive that we are loath to dismiss with a few 
words, as must however, be done, the remain- 
ing features of the discussion. There is the 
fruitful subject of writing for money, upon which 
we read : 

( I do not doubt that authors ought to be paid ; but 
I certainly agree that a money reward ought never to be 
the chief aim of their writing. And I confess that some 
utterances about copyrights in these days have jarred 
upon me, because they seem to imply that the doctrine 
is not disavowed so unequivocally as it should be by our 
leaders.' 

Then there is the subject of writing too much 
to write anything well, concerning which the 
author discourses feelingly, and of which mel- 
ancholy examples are about us on every hand. 
Then there is the suggestive disquisition upon 
literary preaching, which deserves an article by 



The Duties of Authors 101 

itself. Finally, there is the deeply interesting 
discussion of duty as it applies to the imaginative 
worker, the duty of eschewing false realism and 
false sentimentalism alike, of avoiding like the 
plague the promptings of the familiar spirit that 
confuses notoriety with fame, and, pointing out 
how easily the one may be secured, deludes the 
writer into thinking that it is much the same 
thing as the other. All these matters must be 
passed over with a word, and space found only 
for the conclusion that c the enduring power of 
every great writer depends not merely on his 
intellectual forces, but upon the charm of his 
character — the clear recognition of what it really 
is that makes life beautiful and desirable, and of 
what are the baser elements that fight against 
the elevating forces.' 



io2 Various Views 



TENDENCIES IN LITERATURE. 

To the seasoned critic, there are few things so 
amusing as the habit the amateur observer has 
of indulging in broad generalizations concerning 
contemporary literature. Some book proves to 
be the fashion of the hour, and straightway it is 
made the subject of philosophizing. What is 
merely a ripple upon the surface of popular taste 
is viewed as a fresh and deep current of human 
thought, and this supposedly new departure of 
the spirit serves as a starting-point for many a 
solemn disquisition upon types and schools and 
movements. These grave inductions from a 
single instance, or a few instances, however 
philosophical the parade of the terms in which 
they are presented, betray their essentially un- 
philosophical character by the obvious inade- 
quacy of their basis of fact. They are made 
only to be forgotton, as, in the majority of cases, 
the books that occasioned them are forgotten, 
after the lapse of a few years. It is not so very 



Tendencies in Literature 103 

long ago that the American public was reading 
and talking c Trilby ' with such frantic enthusi- 
asm that one would have thought a new literary 
era had dawned. Many were the seeming-wise 
reflections of which this entertaining story was 
the innocent provoking cause, many were the 
hopes, or the fears, for our literary development 
that took their starting point from the vogue of 
this particular piece of fiction. All this discus- 
sion was the work of the amateur, and we now 
realize how absurd it all was. The novel in 
question is clean forgotten to-day, and with it 
the whole argument based upon its success. 
Anyone can see now what the practiced critic 
saw all the time, that there was no more signifi- 
cance in the astonishing vogue of 'Trilby' than 
there had been a score of years earlier in the 
equally astonishing vogue of c Helen's Babies.' 
In point of fact, when the philosophical stu- 
dent of literature confronts the question of liter- 
ary tendencies, he sees two things with absolute 
distinctness. One of them is that the study of 
tendencies, of movements, of the transformations 
of a nation's idealisms, is the most important 
thing about the history of any literature, the only 



104 Various Views 

thing, indeed, that invests a literature with real 
significance for the history of culture. If he 
cannot discern the evolutionary process at work, 
he misses all the salt and savor of his subject, 
and his conclusions are empirical or merely sub- 
jective. The other thing is that this process of 
development, this history of movements and 
transformations, requires for its proper obser- 
vation a considerable period to be taken into 
survey, and a considerable detachment, in point 
of time, from that period. The one well-nigh 
impossible task is to trace the direction of the 
evolutionary process in one's immediate sur- 
roundings, or to make any prophecies for the 
future save those that are the logical outcome of 
some tendency that has been in operation long 
enough to become clearly discerned. 

Suppose one were to take some representative 
collection of contemporary literature, such, for 
example, as the closing section of either of Mr. 
Stedman's great anthologies, and read it through 
intent only upon the detection of tendencies, or 
of unifying principles, he would find it an 
extremely difficult matter to reduce to order his 
confused and varied impressions. In such a case, 



Tendencies in Literature 105 

it is impossible to see the woods for the trees. 
To discern the tendencies at work in such a 
mass of literary production, to find the pattern 
in so complex a web of intellectual activity, to 
distinguish the currents from the eddies in so 
wide an expanse of waters, would be a task well 
worth attempting, indeed, but one likely to 
baffle the most persistent effort. Of course the 
problem might to a certain extent be simplified 
by discarding the great mass of the work as 
merely reflecting the hues caught from the 
greater poems, as merely echoing the significant 
ideas of the age put forth by the few writers 
who set the pitch for the symphony. The lesser 
writers contribute to the harmony (or the dis- 
cord) and the tone-coloring of the composition, 
but they do not modify the fundamental char- 
acter of the movement. Nevertheless, the diffi- 
culty is not really removed by this process of 
elimination ; it is somewhat lessened, and that 
is all. 

A few generalizations, however, concerning 
the tendencies and characteristics of our contem- 
porary English literature it seems reasonably safe 
to make, and one of them is that we are living 



io6 Various Views 

in a critical rather than a creative period. As 
the few great survivors of the earlier age one by 
one pass away, we feel acutely conscious that 
the places are left unfilled. The season of 
analysis and introspection is clearly upon us. In 
such a period as ours, versatility, good taste, and 
excellent workmanship abound, and the number 
of good writers, as distinguished from the great 
masters, is astonishingly large. Sometimes they 
spring up in the most unexpected quarters, and 
anticipation flutters at the thought of a possible 
resurgence of the creative impulse. But we must 
not deceive ourselves into thinking that our bust- 
ling literary activity is swelling to any appreci- 
able or noticeable extent the stock of the world's 
masterpieces. Our literature of to-day is vari- 
ous and entertaining, it has taste and even dis- 
tinction, but it is not a literature adorned by the 
opulent blossoming of genius. 

If we may venture, after the preceding dis- 
claimer, to indicate any distinct tendencies in the 
English and American literature of the past few 
years, we would say that it has moved, and is 
still moving, in the direction of artistic freedom, 
of cosmopolitan interest, and of broadened social 



Tendencies in Literature 107 

sympathy. It no longer suffers, for example, 
under the reproach of being produced with an 
exaggerated deference to the Young Person. 
To place under the ban whole tracts of human 
life, to refrain from dealing with whole groups of 
the most important of human relations because 
their treatment gives offense to immature minds, 
is a procedure not justified by the larger view of 
what literature means. This lesson we have 
learned of recent years. If we take into ac- 
count the newest of new women and the young- 
est of emancipated young men, it may seem that 
the lesson has been too well learned, but, on the 
whole, out literary art has gained strength with 
its newly acquired freedom. Our literature is 
also measurably freed from its old-time provin- 
cialism of outlook. We have seen established 
for the mintage of the mind a broader compact 
than any Latin Union; if an idea have but intrin- 
sic value, its currency does not now need to be 
forced in other countries than that of its origin. 
This, too, is a great gain, and will make the next 
creative period all the easier of approach. But 
the greatest gain of all, to our thinking, is the 
awakening of the new social sympathy that char- 



108 Various Views 

acterizes our recent literature. We hear a good 
deal of c democratic art/ and much of what we 
have thus far got is distressingly crude and dull 
with didacticism. But the future of our race 
belongs to democracy, and literature must make 
the best of this inevitable movement. That it 
will eventually learn how to shape the idealism 
of democracy into forms of convincing beauty 
we make no doubt, and the signs are not want- 
ing that such an issue is near at hand. An illus- 
tration of resounding significance may be found 
in the work of the greatest of living Russians. 
The writings of Count Tolstoy, or to be more 
exact, the earnest attention which they have 
received during the past few years, offer an impres- 
sive example of the power of the social motive, 
as embodied in the forms of Active art, to make 
itself felt as a force in literature. Here is a 
writer whose whole genius is spent in an impas- 
sioned appeal to purely democratic sympathies, 
and, as the years go on, his figure assumes 
grander and grander proportions, and his utter- 
ance seems to become more and more invested 
with the attributes of prophecy. 



Energy and Art 109 



ENERGY AND ART. 

Mr. Swinburne speaks somewhere of the dis- 
tinction, which yet amounts to l no mutually 
exclusive division,' between the gods and the 
giants of literature. Practically the same dis- 
tinction is made by his friend, Mr. Theodore 
Watts-Dunton, in the statement, which recurs 
frequently in the writings of the latter critic, to 
the effect that poetic energy and poetic art are 
c the two forces that move in the production 
of all poetry.' The distinction is illuminating 
for the understanding of poetry, for these two 
forces are the fundamental elements of the effec- 
tive appeal of literature, as, indeed, of all the 
forms of artistic endeavor. In the greatest of 
poets, to be sure, we find the two forces to 
coexist in such supreme degree and perfect bal- 
ance that they become, as it were, merely the 
two aspects of the phenomenon which we call 
genius, and we understand that for the highest 
achievements of literature the one is but the 



no Various Views 

necessary complement of the other. This is 
what we find in Shakespeare and Dante and 
Pindar, possibly also in Goethe and Milton. 
But when we view the work of the poets who 
just escape inclusion in the small company of 
the supreme singers of the world, we nearly 
always discover some preponderance of energy 
over art or of art over energy. As coming 
under the latter category, for example, we think 
of Sophocles and Virgil and Tennyson ; while 
the former category embraces iEschylus and 
Lucretius and Victor Hugo. Taking a step still 
further away from the great masters, we meet 
with such fairly antipodal contrasts as are 
offered by Horace and Juvenal, by Spenser 
and Jonson, or by Keats and Byron. In these 
cases we have either art so finished that the 
energy has become potential, or energy so unre- 
strained that the art has been well-nigh ignored. 
This thought may profitably be pursued into 
the domain of prose literature, and even, as was 
above suggested, into the field of the fine arts in 
general. The noblest prose — that of Plato, for 
example — has the same balance of energy and 
art that is displayed by tbe noblest poetry. On 



Energy and Art m 

the other hand, we have tremendous energy with 
but scant art in such a writer as Carlyle, well- 
nigh perfect art with but little energy in such a 
writer as Landor. In architecture, the Gothic 
style astonishes us with its energy, the classic 
style entrances us with its art. In sculpture, the 
one type is represented by Michel Angelo, the 
other by Thorwaldsen. In painting, the pre- 
dominance of energy in Tintoretto is as unques- 
tionable as the predominance of art in Raphael. 
And in music, while Bach and Beethoven stand 
for the Shakespearian harmony of both forces in 
their highest development, we may easily discern 
the overplus of energy in Liszt and Tschaikow- 
sky, of art in Gluck and Mozart. The broad 
distinction between the classic and the romantic 
styles, which runs through all the arts, is, more- 
over, to a considerable extent, the distinction 
between these two primary forces under other 
names. 

In a recent number of c The Athenaeum * 
there are some interesting remarks upon this 
subject as it is related to literary criticism, 
remarks in which it would be an affectation 
to pretend not to recognize the hand of Mr. 



ii2 Various Views 

Watts-Dunton. c It would be unseemly here to 
criticize contemporary criticism, but it may, 
without intending offense, be said that while the 
appreciation of poetry as an energy is as strong 
as ever in the criticism of the present day, the 
appreciation of poetry as an art is non-existent, 
except in one or two quarters which we need 
not indicate. . . . To go no further back than 
the time when Rossetti's poems were published, 
compare the critical canons then in vogue with 
the critical canons of the present day. On 
account of a single cockney rhyme, the critics 
of that period would damn a set of verses in 
which perhaps a measure of poetic energy was 
not wanting. The critics of to-day fall for the 
most part into two classes : those who do not 
know what is meant by a cockney rhyme, and 
those who love a cockney rhyme.' If this is 
true, it is a serious matter, for we are not con- 
tent to share the'non-committal position of the 
writer, who confines himself to saying: c We 
merely record an interesting and suggestive fact 
of literary history. If in poetical criticism the 
wisdom of one generation is the folly of the 
next, it is the same in everything man says and 



Energy and Art 113 

in everything he does, so whimsical a creature 
has the arch-humorist Nature set at the top of 
the animal kingdom.' 

For our part, we believe that the appreciation 
of poetry as an art is essential to the very exist- 
ence of criticism, and are far from willing to 
admit that it is non-existent at the present day. 
It is true enough that a great deal of verbiage 
about poetry issues from the c blind mouths ' of 
self-constituted critics who know not whereof 
they speak ; but that has always been the case. 
Our writer himself makes the saving admission 
that the art of poetry still finds appreciation 4 in 
one or two quarters which we need not indicate,' 
and that is probably all that might be said of the 
criticism of Rossetti's time, or of a still earlier 
generation. When we are well along into the 
twentieth century, it is precisely the criticism 
from these unindicated quarters that will alone 
survive, and will urge the writers of that period 
in turn to say things about the decay of criticism 
in their own time. The ineptitudes of the criti- 
cism that greeted the early work of Keats and 
Shelley, of Wordsworth and Tennvson, were 
surely as unfortunate as any utterances of the 



ii4 Various Views 

present day, and, what is particularly to the 
point, they were lacking in precisely that appre- 
ciation of poetry as art for which Mr. Watts- 
Dunton seeks almost in vain in our current crit- 
ical literature. 

Having entered this protest against a state- 
ment that seems altogether too sweeping, we 
are now prepared to admit that a good manv 
present-day facts lend countenance to the con- 
tention. Popular opinion naturally cares more 
for energy than for art in literature, for the 
obvious reason that it is stirred bv the one and 
not easily susceptible to the appeal of the other. 
It feels the power of Browning, for example, 
and, although by long familiarity made dimlv 
conscious of the exquisite art of Tennyson, is 
disposed to allow the one quality to offset the 
other, and consider the two as equally great 
poets. It is the same rough-and-ready sort of 
judgment that for a long time held Byron to be a 
greater poet than Wordsworth, that in our own 
time thinks of Tolstoi as a greater master of 
fiction than Tourguenieff, or that made Juvenal 
seem a greater poet than Virgil to the individual 
idiosyncrasy of Hugo, or Wordsworth and even 



Energy and Art 115 

Byron greater poets than Shelley to the individ- 
ual idiosyncrasy of Matthew Arnold. It is the 
sort of judgment that reaches the culmination 
of extravagance in the things that are sometimes 
said about Walt Whitman by the injudicious 
among his admirers. When we consider that 
Whitman's verses are not even what the worst 
of Browning's are — c verses from trie typo- 
graphical point of view ' — we may realize to 
what an extent criticism gone mad is capable of 
ignoring poetic art and resting its case upon 
poetic energy alone. 

The reference to Arnold suggests reflections 
of a deeper sort. That the writer who was on 
the whole the truest and finest English critic of 
our generation occasionally went wrong, is well 
enough understood ; and it is generally admitted 
that his dicta about Shelley constitute the most 
wrong-headed of all his utterances. Now the 
substance of his criticism was that Shelley's 
poetry is c beautiful but ineffectual ' — the pas- 
sage is too familiar to need quotation in full, — 
and the implication clearly is that it is more 
important for poetry to be effectual — charged 
with energy, that is — than beautiful. This is 



n6 Various Views 

mainly interesting as going to show how a critic 
of the best type may be deluded by a formula, 
since this condemnation of poetry for being inef- 
fectual is merely an application of the c criticism 
of life ' formula which gave a doctrinaire tinge 
to so much of Arnold's writing. We do not for 
a moment admit that Shelley's poetry is inef- 
fectual — we have known too many young and 
generous souls to be moved by it as by a trumpet 
call- — but we understand that its energy is so 
bound up with the loveliness of its art that the 
critic who is looking chiefly for the bearings of 
poetry upon conduct might easily be led — as 
Arnold was — to underestimate the energy in 
the presence of so dazzling an art. All of which 
goes simply to show that the critic who is bent 
upon finding the effectual in poetry may miss it 
for the very reason of an unworthy distrust in 
the beautiful. c Beauty is truth/ but this does 
not mean that the truth need stick out at all 
sorts of angles from the beautiful structure. 

On the whole, while there are some signs 
that energy gets more attention than art from 
critics nowadays, and while popular judgments 



Energy and Art 117 

are based, as was always the case, upon little 
save energy in poetry, we are inclined to say 
that the only criticism that counts seriously does 
not notably disregard the claims of art. There 
are still men like Mr. Watts-Dunton and Mr. 
Stedman and M. Brunetiere to expound poetry 
to an incredulous public, and we do not recall 
that earlier periods have been much better 
served. And the same incredulous public re- 
mains, as it always did remain, mostly imper- 
vious to the doctrine of the critic, and continues 
to worship its false gods — occasionally blunder- 
ing into worship of a true one, — comfortably 
thinks that it is enjoying poetry when it is only 
dazzled by rhetorical fireworks or dazed by 
sledge-hammer blows upon the brain, and gets 
a great deal of philistine satisfaction out of life 
generally, and regards critics as daft persons of 
most unaccountable tastes. And the beautiful 
remains the beautiful in all ages, its laws immu- 
table and its strength sure, while some there be 
who find it out, and, not content to know it for 
their own enjoyment alone, bid others to the 
feast and help them to understand how, although 



n8 Various Views 

poetic energy by itself may accomplish much, 
conjoined with poetic art it may accomplish 
more, and that the abiding power of literature 
resides in its form more than in its force, or 
rather that the form alone can preserve the force 
from becoming spent in the hour of its birth. 



Architecture of the Mind 119 



THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE 
MIND. 

In the history of architecture there have been 
two predominant types, the Greek and the 
Gothic. Each of them has undergone historical 
modifications, in accordance with the changing 
needs of mankind, but each has nevertheless 
remained true to its fundamental ideal. In the 
case of Greek architecture, that ideal has com- 
prised unity of design, symmetry of construction, 
and simple definite relations between the several 
parts. In the case of Gothic architecture, it has 
meant more attention to detail than to the gen- 
eral plan, a disregard of severely proportioned 
lines, and a certain degree of confusion of aim. 
The difference between the Parthenon and 4 the 
Bible of Amiens,' for example, illustrates a fun- 
damental divergence of method and of aspira- 
tion; the two ideal types are here exhibited in 
the strongest of possible contrasts. 

Transferring now our attention from the sin- 



i2o Various Views 

gle field of architecture to the broader domain 
of art in general, we find the same contrast of 
type exhibited wherever we look, although we 
broaden our terms to correspond with the wider 
view, and now say classical and romantic, in- 
stead of simply saying Greek and Gothic. The 
Parthenon is classical art, but so also are the 
c Antigone ' and the Hermes of Olympia and 
the Pompeian frescoes. So also are the fugues 
of Bach and the canvases of David, and the 
c Hellenics ' of Landor. On the other hand, 
Amiens cathedral is romantic art, but so also are 
the sculptures of Michelangelo and the plays of 
Shakespeare and the paintings of Rossetti. In 
some sense even, as a foreshadowing of the 
romanticism of the modern Christian world, the 
measures of Pindar and of Virgil escape from 
the restraints of the classical spirit, and take the 
freer range which we attribute primarily to the 
form of art which it was the province of the 
Middle Ages and the Renaissance to develop in 
all its fulness of creative splendor. 

It does not seem to us an altogether fanciful 
analogy to find in the domain of the intellectual 



Architecture of the Mind 121 

life, as distinguished from the creative, a similar 
divergence of fundamental types. We find the 
intellect whose characteristics are unity and 
symmetry and definite relationship of activities ; 
and we find the intellect with w T hose character- 
istics these are strongly contrasted, to which 
they are often diametrically opposed. In the 
first category we have the makers of systems, 
the men whose works exhibit an architectonic 
character so evident that our attention is directed 
to the coherent whole rather than to the separate 
details. That is, each detail, however significant 
in itself, becomes much more significant when 
considered in relation to the entire logical struc- 
ture. Such an intellect keeps itself well in 
hand, restrains the tendency to capricious ex- 
pression, is firmly based upon certain funda- 
mental ideas, and brings every vagrant fancy 
wherewith it is beset to the primary test of this 
essential conformity. We recognize this type 
of mind in Euclid, in Aquinas, in Spinoza, in 
Kant, and in Mr. Herbert Spencer. In each 
individual case, we realize that the work must 
stand or fall as a whole, that, given a logical 



122 Various Views 

method of procedure, it will stand if the founda- 
tions are sound, and that if they are shaky the 
entire structure must totter to its fall. 

In the second of our categories we find those 
discursive intellects that are content to exhibit the 
separate facets of truth as it is revealed to them, 
that take sufficient satisfaction in its sparkling 
gleam, and make no effort to bring the light to a 
single focus. They feel instinctively that truth 
as a whole must be self-consistent, and leave to 
more svmpathetic minds the task of reconciling 
seeming contradictions and of elucidating what- 
ever appears paradoxical. Such minds, when 
actively at work, live intensely in the present 
moment, leaving the past and the future to care 
for themselves, and giving slight heed to the 
accusation of inconsistency. To this intel- 
lectual type we accredit Cicero (the epistolary 
and philosophical Cicero), Montaigne, Samuel 
Johnson (with all his crabbed prejudices), Vol- 
taire, Hume, Ruskin, and Emerson. Probably 
the traditional classification which makes of all 
men by nature either Aristotelians or Platonists 
is not very different from that which we have 
here sought to indicate. 



Architecture of the Mind 123 

Each of these contrasted modes of the intel- 
lectual life has its own particular attendant dan- 
gers, and each needs the corrective influence of 
the other. In the former case, there is always 
the danger of doctrinaireism, of twisting the truth 
to fit the preconceived scheme, of seeking to 
demand acceptance by the sheer force of logical 
coherency. Reverting to our architectural figure, 
there is always the danger of magnifying the 
importance of the structure qua structure, and of 
the consequent failure to adapt it to human needs. 
In the latter case, there is always the danger of 
encouraging a lax mental habit, of holding the 
requirements of logic too cheap, of allowing the 
impulse or the emotion of the moment to usurp 
the sway of the sovereign reason. The resulting 
structure is apt to be comparable to one of these 
composite buildings in which the eye is engaged 
by many fascinating details, but in which it can 
take no satisfaction as a whole. 

The natural bent of each individual who 
leads the intellectual life in any sort will fix the 
essential type to be aimed at. Each type has its 
peculiar satisfactions no less than its peculiar 
dangers. There are some who can conceive of 



124 Various Views 

no other ambition than that which seeks to 
make life of one piece, to shape its intellectual 
activities into a consistent whole. Every new 
idea must be brought to the test of those already 
accepted, must be examined and reexamined in 
the light of the principles that have been adopted 
as fundamentally important. This attitude to- 
ward truth is maintained at the cost of much 
strenuous endeavor, the severe repression of 
many a natural impulse, and the stern rejection 
of many a pleasing fancy. Viewed in retro- 
spect, the reward seems sufficient ; but it is hard 
to keep the chords of the mind strung to the 
requisite pitch, and the temptation at times be- 
comes great to break loose from the stiffening 
bonds of prescription, and give unimpeded play 
to the faculties. Minds of the other type — and 
this is no doubt the prevailing one — are consid- 
erably freer in their activities, and thereby more 
receptive of new impressions. The hobgoblin 
inconsistency has no terrors for them ; they are 
prepared at any time to take a new intellectual 
start, to ignore past conclusions, and to formu- 
late fresh ones in accordance with the new light 



Architecture of the Mind 125 

in which some truth seems to stand revealed. 
The pure reason is no longer the sole dictator of 
thought, but shares its empire in some measure 
with the forces that control the emotional life. 
This attitude finds its satisfactions in the intense 
realizations of the moment which it permits, in 
the part which it allows to the sense of wonder, 
and in the ever-alluring prospect of coming upon 
new gateways of truth. To declare for one or 
the other of these attitudes is probably futile; 
each thinking mind finds its choice already made 
by the time the instinctive and unconscious period 
of thought is past. And whether the philosophy 
of conduct be built up by the logical method of a 
Spinoza or by the haphazard method of a Mon- 
taigne, the practical outcome is apt to be much 
the same with minds of normal endowment. 

We have discussed these contrasting mental 
attitudes with reference to the individuals whom 
they primarily concern; let us in conclusion dis- 
cuss them with reference to their influence upon 
the stream of human thought. In the long run, 
do the systematic thinkers determine the intel- 
lectual currents of history, leaving only its eddies 



126 Various Views 

and surface-ripples to be shaped by the discur- 
sive thinkers ? Our first thought is that they do. 
When we think of the immense authority, ex- 
ercised for century after century, of an Aristotle 
or an Aquinas, it seems as if such were the only 
intellectual forces that have counted. But a lit- 
tle reflection will bring the counter-opinion into 
view, and make us doubt our hasty initial assump- 
tion. Systems have their day and become stripped 
of their authority, whereas no sincere expression 
of the human spirit, struck out in the glow of 
some moment of intense vision, ever wholly loses 
its validity. This is why the poets, on the whole, 
have influenced the thoughts of men more than 
the philosophers. We may take leave to doubt 
whether the c Summa Theologicae ? has, all things 
considered, proved so potent and penetrating an 
influence upon religious thought as the c De Imi- 
tatione Christi,' and we may confidently assert 
that, in the total reckoning, philosophical thought 
owes a greater debt to Plato than it does to 
Aristotle. The influence of the unsystematic 
writers is less imposing, but it seems to be farther- 
reaching than that of the architectonic thinkers. 



Architecture of the Mind 127 

It is, after all, the open mind that makes possible 
all intellectual progress, and the mind of the 
systematic philosopher has too often but a single 
outlook, which may be in the wrong direction, 
turned toward the fading past rather than toward 
the glowing future of human thought. 



i28 Various Views 



IDIOM AND IDEAL. 

Elizabeth Barrett, in one of her letters to 
Robert Browning, asks him whether he con- 
siders l the sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry/ 
adding that, for her part, she does not. The 
reply runs as follows : c The Sailor Language is 
good in its way ; but as wrongly used in Art 
as real clay and mud would be, if one plastered 
them in the foreground of a landscape in order 
to attain to so much truth.' To all of this Miss 
Barrett assents, remarking further that c art with- 
out an ideal is neither nature nor art. The 
question involves the whole difference between 
Madame Tussaud and Phidias.' 

The question of aesthetics thus raised is one 
of peculiar interest to the present period, and 
has become far more burning than it could have 
been when the above correspondence was ex- 
changed. There are few features of the recent 
literary situation as noteworthy as the large 
production and wide vogue of writings which 



Idiom and Ideal 129 

exploit some special form of idiom and rely for 
their main interest upon the appeal to curiosity 
thus made. The idiom of the sailor and the 
soldier, the rustic and the mechanic, have el- 
bowed their way into literature, and demand 
their share of the attention hitherto accorded 
chiefly to educated speech. The normal type 
of English expression has to jostle for recognition 
with the local and abnormal types of the Scotch- 
man and the Irishman, the negro and the baboo, 
and, in our own country particularly, with such 
uncouth mixtures as those of the German- 
American and Scandinavian-American. Exam- 
ples lie upon every hand. We think at once 
of the c kailyard ' group of story-tellers, of c Mr. 
Dooley' and Mr. Seumas McManus, of Mr. 
J. W. Riley and 4 Charles Egbert Craddock,' 
and, foremost among all these phenomena, of 
the writings of Mr. Kipling. 

An observer who looks beyond the momen- 
tary caprices of literary fashion is compelled to 
ask, in the contemplation of so great a volume 
of dialect and specialized jargon, whether this 
sort of work can claim to be literature in any 
high sense of the term. Does the speech of 



130 Various Views 

Tommy Atkins and Marse Chan, the dialect of 
Drumtochty and Donegal, the locution of the 
Hoosier farmer and the Bowery tough, have 
anything of the antiseptic quality that preserves 
a story or a poem and enables it to delight suc- 
cessive generations of readers. The history of 
our literature is fairly instructive upon this point. 
With few exceptions, the writings of the past 
that have relied mainly upon their use of an 
abnormal idiom have passed completely out of 
the memory of men. It is true that such a novel 
as 4 The Antiquary 5 and such a poem as c The 
Northern Farmer ' have assured places among 
the works that live, but how easy it is to see that 
their idiom is merely an accident of their pro- 
duction, and not the determining motive. They 
survive in spite of their departure from accepted 
modes of expression, and not in consequence 
thereof. But nine -tenths of our latter-day 
jargon-mongers have for their whole stock-in- 
trade some grotesque form of English speech ; 
strip them of this, and the revelation of their 
poverty would be indeed pitiful. They offer 
novelty, and they amuse for an hour the novelty- 
seeking section of the public. A little later, 



Idiom and Ideal 131 

their books collect dust upon the library shelves, 
and the counter of the dry-goods store sees them 
no more. 

The case of Mr. Kipling offers so typical an 
illustration of the proposition with which we are 
now concerned that it deserves close examina- 
tion. We should be the last to deny the noble 
qualities of Mr. Kipling's art in its finer mani- 
festations. While it almost never gives evidence 
of that labor limce of which the really great mas- 
ters are so lavish, its prime sautier quality, its 
downright energy and superb emotional appeal, 
compel our admiration, and almost make us wish 
that the praise bestowed might be ungrudging. 
If we judge Mr. Kipling by his good work alone, 
as every poet has a right to be judged, he must 
be given a place among the dozen or so of living 
English singers who approach most closely the 
height now occupied in solitary eminence by 
Mr. Swinburne. As a writer of prose narrative 
he has taken a lesson from Bret Harte, and 
bettered the instruction. He is not one of the 
great novelists, but the best of his stories have a 
fair chance of being read well along in the twen- 
tieth century. So much, and possibly more, 



132 Various Views 

must be accorded him by every sober-minded 
critic. 

But between this measured and deserved praise 
on the one hand, and the wild acclaim of Mr. 
Kipling's present vogue on the other, there is a 
great gulf fixed. And when we come to inquire 
into the causes of the vogue, we find that it has 
little to do with his best work. It is the c Danny 
Deever ' sort of poem, and not c The English 
Flag ' sort of poem, which nine out of ten of 
his vociferous admirers have in mind when they 
proclaim him a poet after their own heart ; and it 
is the Mulvaney sort of story, rather than c The 
Finest Story in the World,' that they are really 
thinking of when they assert that he is first 
and the rest nowhere among story-tellers. A 
vogue that is based upon such judgments as 
these has a precarious vitality, and the reasons 
for which Mr. Kipling will be held in honorable 
literary remembrance are very different from 
those that determine his present popularity. It 
may be said that c The Recessional ' affords 
common ground upon which the man of taste 
and the groundling may stand in voicing the 



Idiom and Ideal 133 

praises of its author. This is, no doubt, a fine 
poem, although not without obvious faults, and 
it is greatly to the credit of the uncritical public 
that the poem found so responsive an echo in so 
many hearts. But when we find many ofthe 
same voices raised in praise of c The White 
Man's Burden,' apparently not knowing the dif- 
ference between the two, the situation c gives to 
think,' as the French say. And when we hear 
4 The Recessional ' recited approvingly by men 
who deny that their own nation should ever, 
no matter how greatly it has sinned, make the 
'ancient sacrifice' of c an humble and a contrite 
heart,' — by men, in short, upon whose lips such 
words are blasphemy, — we may see the differ- 
ence between lip-service and sympathetic appre- 
ciation of a poem, and take at something like its 
true value the popular estimate of this particular 
poem and its author. 

c The sailor language is good in its way,' as 
Browning said ; but it is not the way of great 
literature. And the same observation holds true 
ofthe soldier language, and the locomotive-driver 
language, and the Anglo-Indian language. 



134 Various Views 

'For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' << Chuck 

him out, the brute !" 
But it 's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin 

to shoot; 
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything 

you please; 
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool — you bet that 

Tommy sees! ' 

This sort of thing is amusing, and vigorous, and 
even ethically sound ; but it is not literature, for 
it does not square with the sober definitions. 
What, for example, has it to do with Mr. 
Morley's c Literature consists of all the books 
. . . where moral truth and human passion are 
touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and 
attractiveness of form ' ? And what remotest 
point of contact does it have with this statement 
of Pater's abstract aestheticism : c All art con- 
stantly aspires toward the condition of music — 
music, then, and not poetry, as is so often sup- 
posed, is the true type or measure of perfected 
art'? ' Not merely does the bulk of Mr. Kip- 
ling's work — and of the work of those count- 
less lesser writers among whom he occupies a 
typical position — fail to become art in anything 
like this transcendental sense, but it does not 



Idiom and Ideal 135 

even seek to be art in the narrow sense that 
takes literature to be a self-contained process, 
with its own exclusive ideals. It does not aim 
to be ideal at all, but tries to outdo the rudest 
realism hitherto known. Reverting once more 
to Browning's trenchant comment, it plasters its 
clay and mud in the foreground of the landscape, 
and wins a cheap popular applause for its deft- 
ness, while the judicious stand apart and grieve 
at so violent a renunciation of idealism. For 
art, to be art at all, must be ideal. While it is 

true that 

'Beyond that art 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes/ 

it nevertheless remains the duty of the artist to 
add to nature in the measure permitted by his 
imagination ; failing in this task, or deliberately 
eschewing it, he is recreant to his calling, and 
his work has no excuse for existence. 



136 Various Views 



THE REVALUATION OF 
LITERATURE. 

Two recent numbers of 'The Atlantic Monthly' 
have included in their contents an essay well cal- 
culated to startle the readers, especially the older 
readers, of that conservative magazine. The 
essay in question is from the pen of a new 
writer, and is nothing less than a frank revalu- 
ation of the work of Emerson. Discarding, as 
far as possible, all traditional judgments, the 
attempt is made to estimate, from the broader 
because more cosmopolitan standpoint of these 
latter days, and in the light of a fuller knowl- 
edge than was in the possession of an earlier 
generation, the value of Emerson's contribution 
to American thought and American literature. 
Some of the conclusions reached by the critic are 
so far at variance with those that have long been 
seemingly crystallized in the histories of our 
literature that one rubs his eyes at the iconoclas- 
tic utterances, and wonders if anything is sacred 



Revaluation of Literature 137 

to these daring young men who are so busily 
engaged in bringing us new lamps to exchange 
for our old ones. It is not that the essay betrays 
animus, or is in any offensive sense an attack 
upon a great and cherished reputation, but rather 
that its writer has set about a de novo exposition, 
and has freed himself from the trammels of 
the conventional phrase and the conventional 
attitude. When we remember the indignation 
aroused in certain quarters less than fifteen years 
ago by the very qualified and cautious strictures 
of Matthew Arnold upon our beloved philoso- 
pher of the transcendental, it is a noteworthy 
sign of the times that the indigenous c Atlantic ' 
should open its pages to an estimate of Emerson 
compared with which the Arnold essay marks 
almost the extreme of laudatory and reverent 
handling. 

It is not our present intention to examine this 
newest interpretation of Emerson, or even to 
express any very decided opinion upon its fair- 
ness, either in detail or as a whole. We doubt, 
indeed, if Emerson's warmest devotees in the 
past have ever given full expression to their real 
thought, or at least to the whole of their thought, 



138 Various Views 

upon the subject. Their panegyric must have 
been accompanied by some mental reservations, 
for upon certain sides Emerson's mind was curi- 
ously limited, and in very obvious ways. But 
we may profitably seize the occasion for the 
purpose of a few reflections upon the provisional 
character of all contemporaneous literary judg- 
ments, and upon the necessity of such revalu- 
ations as the one now in question, before any- 
thing like finality can be hoped for. Can we 
never know, one is apt to cry somewhat despair- 
ingly, can we never really know whether the 
men of our own time, who so tower above the 
crowd, and to whom we bring the incense of our 
hero worship, are in fact men of stature fit to 
stand among the chosen of history ? We can 
see that they are taller than the men about 
them, and can we not get their figures in such 
perspective with the figures of other generations 
that we may know how they will stand in the 
retrospective view of our descendants ? Such 
questions as these are constantly arising in crit- 
ical minds strenuous after absolute truth, and 
the attempt to answer them in the affirmative is 
as constantly baffled. 



Revaluation of Literature 139 

Yet there are ways, if one will but seek them, 
in which our judgment of the men living in our 
midst may be in a measure purified and brought 
into rough conformity with the judgments that 
will be recorded by posterity. If we would 
escape from the error of the personal equation, 
we may do so in part by cultivating a tolerance 
of opinions not our own ; if the national or racial 
equation be (as it nearly always is) a source of 
error, w T e may largely eliminate it by consulting 
the judgment of intelligent men of other nations 
and races. But if we adopt the chauvinistic 
attitude in such matters, our case is quite hope- 
less. If we call all rational and balanced 
criticism that comes from abroad mere 'conde- 
scension in foreigners,' — if, what is worse still, 
we reply to every adverse English or Continental 
comment with a childish tu quoque, — we simply 
wrap ourselves up, head and all, in the mantle 
of provincialism, and barter our critical birth- 
right for a little applause from the meaner spirits 
of our own day and our own Little Pedlington. 
There is more truth than is commonly realized 
in the saying that w 7 e may find a sort of contem- 
poraneous posterity in foreign opinion. Then, 



140 Various Views 

to approach the problem from another point of 
view, we find that in nearly all the cases in 
which some great writer has been ignored by 
contemporary opinion, there have not been lack- 
ing in his own time a few clear-sighted critics 
who have discerned the true quality of the neg- 
lected genius. Preaching to deaf ears in their 
own generation, these critics have found honor 
in the next, and shared in the posthumous praise 
that has come to the poets who got scant praise 
while they were alive. It may usually be found 
that in such unheeded utterances there is a note 
of conviction, a sense of absolute certainty that 
time will prove them to have been right. When 
we come upon such judgments, and realize, with 
our better light, how well-founded they were, we 
find it almost impossible to understand how they 
could have spent their force unechoed. We also 
learn that a genuine critical idea, however long 
may be the period of its gestation, emerges into 
active life in the end. Nothing could be more 
instructive for us, if we would escape the tyr- 
anny of the 4 subjective criticism ' that so colors 
and distorts the popular judgments of every 
period, than a careful study of the thought of 



Revaluation of Literature 141 

those men of the past whose intellectual habit 
has enabled them to anticipate the verdict of 
posterity ; nothing could be more helpful than 
the endeavor to acquire something of their tem- 
per, and to transfer our standards to their objec- 
tive plane. 

In our age, however, the question which con- 
fronts us is the question of deciding upon relative 
values rather than that of discovering neglected 
genius. There are so many voices to-day, and 
so many organs of opinion, so strong a determi- 
nation to let no new talent bud undetected, and 
so intricate a critical apparatus for the exploita- 
tion of every new literary development, that the 
world is far less likely than formerly to pass the 
strong man bv, and the real critical danger lies in 
what has been wittily described as the c cygnifica- 
tion of geese.' But time may be trusted to set 
these false classifications right, and that very 
speedily ; while we may with equal confidence 
depend upon the same potent agencv for the re- 
adjustments and the regroupings that determine 
for the reputations of the hour their final stations 
in the pantheon of fame. 

The day seems to have come to attempt some 



142 Various Views 

such readjustment of the positions of our older 
American writers, a*nd the essay which has fur- 
nished us with our text is in this respect timely. 
Its very title reminds us that it is now sixty years 
since the traditional estimate of Emerson was 
given shape, and sixty years means two gener- 
ations. One who follows the deeper currents 
of opinion can hardly fail to have observed that 
recent years have placed us in a more critical 
attitude toward the great men of our literary 
past, and that the old unquestioning acceptance 
has given place to a more searching and object- 
ive examination of their quality. As a result of 
this development of our critical temper, some 
men have gained and others have lost. Lowell 
and Whittier have, we should say, gained dis- 
tinctly ; and Hawthorne (considering his finest 
work) has still better stood the test of time. 
On the other hand, Emerson, considering the 
fetichism of which he was long made the sub- 
ject in certain quarters, could hardly fail to lose, 
just as Longfellow and Bryant have lost. The 
friends of Lanier have almost made good his 
title to a place among our major poets, while 



Revaluation of Literature 143 

the friends of Parkman have been quite success- 
ful in securing for him the highest rank among 
our historians. As for the two men of genius at 
whose names American opinion has long looked 
askance, while European opinion has been lec- 
turing us in clamorous fashion upon their great- 
ness, we must say that the critical issue is still 
uncertain, with the odds rather in favor of Poe 
and rather against Whitman. But in these two 
cases, feeling is probably even yet too strong for 
judgment, and we shall have to wait until we get 
into some future generation c where beyond these 
voices there is peace ' before we shall know the 
definite status of either our enfant terrible or our 
c good gray poet.' For one feature of the crit- 
ical reconstruction now in full swing we may 
all be devoutly thankful, and that is the growing 
tendency to break down the artificial barrier 
between American and c British ' literature, the 
growing realization of the fact that, as men of 
essentially one blood and one speech, English- 
men and Americans are at work in the produc- 
tion of a common literature. Despite the occa- 
sional mouthings of literary jingoes upon both 



144 Various Views 

sides of the Atlantic, the lesson is now fairly 
well learned that the standards by which we 
judge a Tennyson and a Wordsworth must be 
the same as the standards by which we estimate 
the worth of a Lowell or an Emerson. 



The Gentle Reader 145 



THE GENTLE READER. 

Among the many agreeable features of the holi- 
day season, there is none more pleasant than the 
making of gifts. The truly human being, who 
feels himself no isolated unit in the total of con- 
scious existence, but rather a creature linked to 
his fellows by the countless ties of sympathetic 
association, takes a greater delight in preparing 
holiday surprises for those who are dear to him 
than he does in the anticipation of the satisfac- 
tions that may reasonably be expected to accrue 
to his own existence. It is pleasant to dwell 
in thought upon the coming days of relaxation, 
with their good cheer for mind and body alike, 
but it is even more pleasant to make little plans 
for the happiness of others, and to select for 
them those small mementoes which mean so 
much for the tastes and the affections, however 
slight may be the estimate set upon them in the 
market-place. Among these remembrances, the 

tokens by which we express ourselves far more 
10 



146 Various Views 

effectively than by means of any words, there 
are none more important than books, for there 
are none that are possessed of so much of the 
spiritual or symbolic value that we should always 
seek to embody in our gifts. However limited 
may be our resources, they are sufficient to com- 
pass the procuring of the richest treasures of the 
spirit as it is revealed in literary art. Nor is 
there need to be ashamed of the setting provided 
for these jewels, for the arts that belong to 
bookmaking, as distinguished from the art of 
the writer of books, have grown increasingly 
worthy of their task, and so cunningly fit the 
page to the margin, so tastefully fit the cover to 
the pages, so harmoniously fit the decoration to 
the covers, that all the aesthetic sensibilities are 
gratified at once, and we marvel that it should 
be possible to offer so much of the product of 
refined taste at so absurdly a small price. 

The majority of books, of course, do not meet 
these conditions, being strictly commercial pro- 
ducts for the consumption of philistines ; but the 
wonder remains that so many books should meet 
them so successfullv ; for to the book-lover of 
nice discrimination, after putting aside the count- 



The Gentle Reader 147 

less impossible objects in the guise of books that 
are everywhere thrust upon his attention, there 
still remains the embarrassment of choice among 
the really desirable editions that offer him so much 
more than mere muslin and paper and print. 
Would he purchase a Shakespeare or a Dickens, 
a Walton or a Boswell, or even so modern a 
classic as a c Marius ' or an c Omar/ he is fairly 
bewildered by the charms of at least three or 
four editions, each of which seems at the moment 
of examination more wholly desirable than any 
other. And when the choice is reluctantly made, 
his memory lingers regretfully over the claims of 
the rejected rivals for his favor, leaving him not 
quite sure that he has chosen wisely after all. 

In making these remarks, we have had in 
mind, as chiefly deserving of consideration, the 
type of book-lover whom it was once the cus- 
tom to designate as c the gentle reader.' The type 
is an old-fashioned one, but it happily remains per- 
sistent, although seemingly crowded aside by the 
enormous recent expansion of the reading public 
as a whole. The gentle reader is essentially a 
reader of good old books rather than of ephem- 
eral new ones. He is apt to look with suspic- 



148 Various Views 

ion upon the celebrities that are exploited by 
publishers and newspapers day after day, and to 
give thanks that he has learned to eschew the 
counsel of these c blind mouths,' that he has long 
since found his way to the perennial sources of lit- 
erary enjoyment. He is still with us, for his tastes 
are still consulted by our purveyors of books, and 
the very publishers who strive eagerly with one 
another for the acquisition of the latest novels 
by the latest notorieties take also good heed to 
provide their lists with reprints of the old estab- 
lished favorites. The many libraries of standard 
literature which are so characteristic a feature of 
publishing at the present time surely answer to 
a genuine demand, and that demand as surely 
testifies to the fact that the gentle reader is insist- 
ing that his interests shall not be neglected. 

We had just got fairly started upon this train 
of reflection when we came across an analysis of 
the tastes and the temper of the gentle reader so 
genial and so sympathetic that we were tempted 
to make a forced loan for the relief of our own 
poverty of expression. This temptation over- 
come, we must at least make a reference to 
the article by the Rev. Mr. Crothers in c The 



The Gentle Reader 149 

Atlantic Monthly,' which reveals to the gentle 
reader his own true self, and explains the work- 
ings of his mind so delightfully that even the 
reader of another sort may come to understand 
something of it, and experience yearnings to be 
himself numbered among the gentle. But if we 
may not borrow from Mr. Crothers, we will at 
least borrow from the Rev. Henry Van Dyke, 
who has also paid his compliments to the gentle 
reader. After dismissing the c simple reader * and 
the * intelligent reader ' as obviously hopeless, this 
writer sets forth the characteristics of the gentle 
reader so charmingly and with such insight that 
we at once feel sure that he knows whereof he 
speaks. 

' The gentle reader/ he says, i is the person who 
wants to grow, and who turns to books as a means of 
purifying his tastes, deepening his feelings, broadening 
his sympathies, and enhancing his joy in life. Litera- 
ture he loves because it is the most humane of the arts. 
Its forms and processes interest him as expressions of the 
human striving towards clearness of thought, purity of 
emotion, and harmony of action with the ideal.' 1 

But better than any characterization of the 
gentle reader — better even than Dr. Van Dyke's 
analysis, is the concrete example offered by many 



150 Various Views 

a man of letters who has taken the public into his 
intimacy, and helped us to feel and to share his 
delight in good literature. Emerson and Lowell, 
Lamb and FitzGerald, were gentle readers of the 
most typical sort, and their success in the voca- 
tion was complete. W hen Mr. James Lane Allen 
interrupts the course of a novel to bring in whole 
pages of Malory, we instantly know him for a 
gentle reader. Others, again, seem to have the 
desire to be gentle readers, but the true vocation 
is lacking. Mr. Ruskin was too intolerant of 
opinions not his own to become one, and Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, try as hard as he may to get 
in, is kept outside the sanctuary by what may be 
called the strenuosity of his positivism. He makes 
a valiant plea for all good books, but we feel while 
he is making it that they have appealed to his intel- 
ligence, and indirectly, by virtue of their signifi- 
cance for the history of culture, and not directly 
by virtue of their quality of deep human sym- 
pathy. 

On the other hand, we know FitzGerald as a 
genuine member of the guild from almost any ran- 
dom page of his familiar correspondence. By way 
of bonnes bouches, and as the best possible illustra- 



The Gentle Reader 151 

tion of our text, let us close by extracting a pas- 
sage or two from the letters in which his quality 
as a bookman is most clearly exhibited. 

* I am now a good deal about in a new Boat I have 
built, and thought (as Johnson took Cocker's Arithmetic 
with him on travel, because he shouldn't exhaust it) 
so I would take Dante and Homer with me, instead of 
Mudie's Books, which I read through directly. I took 
Dante by way of slow Digestion : not having looked at 
him for some years : but I am glad to find I relish him 
as much as ever r he atones with the Sea $ as you know 
does the Odyssey — these are the Men ! * 

'I wonder whether old Seneca was indeed such ahum- 
bug as people now say he was : he is really a fine writer. 
About three hundred years ago, or less, our divines and 
writers called him the Divine Seneca ; and old Bacon is 
full of him. One sees in him the upshot of all the Greek 
philosophy, how it stood in Nero's time, when the Gods 
had worn out a good deal. I don't think old Seneca 
believed he should live again. Death is his great resource. 
Think of the rococosity of a gentleman studying Seneca 
in the middle of February 1844 in a remarkably damp 
cottage.* 

' I cannot get on with Books about the Daily Life 
which I find rather insufferable in practice about me. I 
never could read Miss Austen, nor (later) the famous 
George Eliot. Give me People, Places, and Things, 
which I don't and can't see ; Antiquaries, Jeanie Deans, 
Dalgettys, &c. As to Thackeray's, they are terrible 5 
I really look at them on the shelf, and am half afraid to 
touch them. He, you know, could go deeper into the 



152 Various Views 

Springs of Common Action than these Ladies : won- 
derful he is, but not Delightful, which one thirsts for as 
one gets old and dry.* 

6 Of course the Man must be a Man of Genius to take 
his Ease, but, if he be, let him take it. I suppose that 
such as Dante, and Milton, and my Daddy, took it far 
from easy : well, they dwell apart in the Empyrean ; 
but for Human Delight, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Boc- 
caccio, and Scott.* 

It is worth while to be able to read books in 

the spirit of the writer of these passages, worth 

while even at the expense of a few crotchets 

and a certain amount of irrationality. And it 

is also worth while to learn the lesson of 

FitzGerald's absolute sincerity in stating his 

likes and dislikes. If our personal judgments 

are in line with the established verdict of 

criticism, well and good ; but if they are not, 

there is no virtue in pretending to the contrary. 

The gentle reader, at least, whatever his faults, 

knows the things he likes, and they are pretty 

apt to be the things that the world has agreed 

with him in liking. 



Triumph of the Novelist 153 



THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVELIST. 

During the greater part of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the novel has been the most distinctive of 
literary forms. Historians of literature have so 
amply recognized the fact and critics have so 
copiously moralized over it that the subject has 
become almost as hackneyed as that of the 
weather. The Puritan prejudice against novel- 
reading, once almost as potent as the Moham- 
medan injunction against graphic portrayal of the 
human form, has so completely vanished from 
the general consciousness of the public that we 
look with curious wonder at the belated preacher 
who still here and there voices a protest that 
would have found much support a generation 
or two ago, and that now falls upon absolutely 
unheeding ears. We read novels nowadays as 
a matter of course, just as we go to the theatre 
and eat mince pies, although all of these prac- 
tices were condemned by the sterner morality 
of our forefathers. And not only do we read 



154 Various Views 

novels without compunctions of conscience, but 
we are actually encouraged to read them by 
those to whom we look for intellectual and 
spiritual guidance. Our high schools and col- 
leges prescribe courses in novel-reading, and our 
clergymen take them as texts for their sermons 
in a sense very different from that in which 
they used to be taken by gentlemen of the cloth 
trained in the traditions of an older school. 

While nineteenth-century readers have been, 
as a class, almost universally addicted to the 
fiction-habit, there is no reason for thinking that 
the readers of the twentieth century will be any 
the less so addicted. Philosophical critics some- 
times tell us that the novel will run its course and 
be replaced by something else, just as the drama 
and the poem and the essay have at other times 
and in other lands run their respective courses, 
and lapsed from favor. But these critics do not 
give us any very definite forecast of what the 
coming literary fashion is to be, and the novelist 
meanwhile snaps his fingers at all such icono- 
clasts. He simply keeps on producing what the 
public wants, with small regard for the opinions 
of those who tell us what the public ought to 



Triumph of the Novelist 155 

want. He has ridden upon the top wave of 
prosperity to the very verge of a new century, 
and it is his evident intention to carry into that 
century the practice of the arts whereby his con- 
spicuous fortunes have heretofore been achieved. 
Nearly all the prizes of the literary life come to 
him, and he finds it very pleasant to have them. 
Yachts and villas and other expensive luxuries 
are within his reach, and he looks down with 
patrician pride upon the poor poet in his garret, 
or upon the mere thinker whose intellectual 
work is done in the hours that can be spared 
from the uncongenial toil upon which he must 
depend for subsistence. 

A reflective person, contrasting the position 
of the popular novelist with that occupied by 
the scholar whose strenuous pursuit of truth 
receives but slight recognition from his gener- 
ation, can hardly refrain from a certain indig- 
nation at so unequal a distribution of the gifts 
of fortune. The fiction-writer who succeeds in 
catching the popular ear finds his path made 
easy ever thereafter. Intellectually he may be 
one of the feeblest of mortals, yet the halo of 
fame encircles his head for the time, and he 



156 Various Views 

may with comparative impunity wax oracular 
even upon subjects of which he is most densely 
ignorant. On the other hand the quiet thinker 
must struggle to get an audience, even for ideas 
which he is perhaps the best-qualified man in 
the world to express, and may count himself 
fortunate if his laborious days earn for him an 
existence of the most precarious and exiguous 
sort. He does, indeed, take comfort in the 
assurance that his work is done for a posterity 
that will have forgotten the very name of the 
writer who now basks in the sun of popular 
favor, and in this faith may find strength to 
scorn the delights of the present day, but his 
task is none the less a thankless one, and the 
age is none the less dishonored that makes it 
such. Think, for example, of what the world 
has done for Mr. Rider Haggard and Mr. Her- 
bert Spencer. A few novels, considered as lit- 
erature almost beneath contempt, have earned 
for the one many times over what has been 
earned for the other by the forty years that have 
gone to the building up of one of the most 
imposing and substantial edifices of thought ever 
added to the possessions of mankind. Doubtless, 



Triumph of the Novelist 157 

this material view of the reward of effort is not 
the only view that should be taken, but the lives 
of most men are so hedged about by material 
limitations and conditioned by material necessities 
that it must be reckoned with in determining the 
balance of justice between every man and his 
contemporaries. 

If the triumph of the novelist were a condition 
that concerned only the best producers, there 
would not be so much cause to rail at the degen- 
eracy of an age that: exalts the writer of fiction 
over literary workers of other classes. Fiction, 
at its highest, is one of the noblest of the arts, 
and it would be difficult to bestow recognition 
too generous upon a Scott or a Thackeray, a 
Balzac or a Tourguenieff, a George Eliot or a 
George Sand. Bnt the deserved triumph of such 
writers is attended by an absurdly exaggerated 
estimate of the hosts of the undeserving. The 
whole mass of contemporary fiction benefits by 
the lift given the art by its masters, few in num- 
ber as they are. And the best writers are by no 
means the most successful. Mr. Hardy and Mr. 
Meredith are far less popular than Mr. Hall Caine 
and Mr. Rider Haggard, although the latter are 



158 Various Views 

mere bunglers, while the former, for all their 
perversities, are artists of distinctive genius. 
The attitude of our present-day public towards 
fiction-writers as a class encourages the notion 
that anybody knows enough to write a novel, and 
this notion, which might otherwise be harmless 
enough, is made perniciously effective by the 
publishers, who make it possible for almost any- 
body to get a novel printed. And so we have 
every year new novels by the hundreds, by the 
thousands, novels that have not the slightest 
claim upon any genuine intellectual interest, pre- 
posterous inventions that can only blunt the 
artistic sense of those who are foolish enough to 
read them, exploitations of every variety of dis- 
eased fancy and perverted imagination, guides to 
the conduct of life by young persons who know 
nothing of life themselves, books written with 
no higher aim than amusement that are too dull 
even to achieve that aim, productions of incom- 
petent scribblers who might have found honest 
employment in farming or in housekeeping, and 

made their activities of some real use to society. 

j 

Professor Brander Matthews, in an entertain- 
ing essay, draws an ingenious parallel between 



Triumph of the Novelist 159 

the art of novel-writing and the game of whist. 
Dr. Pole recognizes four stages in the evolution 
of whist, the Primitive Game, the Game of 
Hoyle, the Philosophical Game, and the Latter- 
day Improvements. Four stages, not dissimilar 
to these, may be recognized in the evolution of 
the novel. Professor Matthews dubs them the 
Impossible, the Improbable, the Probable, and 
the Inevitable stages. The c Arabian Nights,' 
c Les Trois Mousquetaires,' c Vanity Fair,' and 
c The Scarlet Letter' are given as examples of the 
four kinds of fiction. But, just as all four forms 
of the game are still practiced by different sets of 
players, the later having failed to displace the 
earlier ones, so all the four forms of fiction are 
still produced by different sets of writers, and 
each still finds its own public. The parallel is 
interesting, and reasonably justified by the facts, 
but its formulator should have added that there 
is, and always has been, a fifth kind of fiction, 
corresponding to the variety of whist known as 
bumblepuppy. And our pride in the develop- 
ments that the art of fiction has unquestionably 
made during the last half-century must be con- 
siderably tempered when we reflect that the great 



160 Various Views 

mass of modern novels comes from writers who 
do not play the game in accordance with the 
rules of any system, primitive or philosophical. 
In a word, the ascendancy of fiction in our 
latter-day literary production is not altogether the 
mark of a heightened appreciation of art. The 
triumph of the novelist is, to a considerable 
degree, a triumph of ineptitude over ability, of 
lower over higher ideals, of slovenly over pains- 
taking workmanship, of incoherence and dispro- 
portion over measured and organic art. 



The Revival of Romance 161 



THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE. 

An attentive reader of a certain issue of c The 
Dial ' must have noticed the fact that no less 
than three of the chief contributions to that issue 
frankly espoused the cause of romance as against 
the claims that have been put forward so stren- 
uously of recent years in behalf of realism. This 
conjunction of opinion was purely fortuitous and 
unpremeditated, and may for that reason be taken 
as a really significant sign of the times. When the 
critic wrote of Cyrano de Bergerac as a heroic 
figure presented c to a world which is all ready to 
enjoy romance once more '; when the essayist 
sought to analyze c the ordinary and the com- 
monplace to see why they fail to afford materials 
for great art,' and concluded by saying that he 
could not c conceive of anything more useless 
than a literature which reproduces life without a 
background of thought and imagination '; when 
the poet personified triumphant Romance return- 
ing to her own, and saying : 



11 



162 Various Views 

i Since of the oldest dynasty am I, 
Delight of life within my gift doth lie 5 
The heart of man, of woman, and of child, 
Without me were to fate unreconciled. 
A space hath Human Fashion banished me; 
But Human Fashion will soon wearied be! 
I only wait the unfed heart's recall, 
To take my place — my place supreme in all/ — 

All three, critic, essayist, and poet alike, were 
expressing, each in his own language, essentially 
the same truth, the truth that Art must better 
Nature and transcend it unless it is prepared to 
abdicate its ancient empire. 

The new romanticism, as was also pointed 
out by at least one of these writers, is not quite 
the same thing as the old, for it has learned 
something from the rival by which it has been 
for a time supplanted. What it has learned is 
the Shakespearian lesson that 
* Nature is made better by no mean, 
But Nature makes that mean: so, o'er that art, 
Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art 
That Nature makes. . . . This is an art 
Which does mend Nature — change it rather: but 
The art itself is Nature.' 

When we speak of the prospective or accom- 
plished revival of romance, we do not mean the 
sort of the thing that satisfied the eighteenth 



The Revival of Romance 163 

century. c The Castle of Otranto,' and L Mel- 
moth the Wanderer,' will hardly serve as proto- 
types of the new product — atavism cannot go 
as far as that — but the romanticism that is now 
carrying literature before it is a form of art that, 
like the giant of Greek fable, gains renewed 
strength from contact with the earth. The 
romancer is no longer privileged to live in the 
clouds, or to dispense with the probabilities, but 
he is nevertheless constrained to idealize and 
ennoble those aspects of life with which he 
is concerned, and to view them, not with the 
scientist, through a microscope, but with the 
philosopher, sub specie cetemitatis. 

The terms realism and romanticism have been 
so bandied about in critical discussion, have been 
made so hackneyed by indiscriminate use, that 
we hesitate to drag them forth once more from 
their decent veteran retirement. And, as we 
have frequently maintained, they almost wholly 
lose their special signification when we seek to 
apply them to literature of the first order. It is 
the shallowest sort of criticism that will be 
content to label the c Inferno ' as realistic and 
4 Hamlet ' as romantic. Where, as in the case 



164 Various Views 

of the world-masterpieces, we are in the presence 
of the sheerest Vision, the tint of the glasses and 
the index of their refraction become matters of 
small importance. It is only upon a lower plane 
of literature that the distinction between realism 
and romanticism actually exists ; it is a distinc- 
tion hardly to be made, for example, between 
Scott and Balzac, or between Tourguenieff and 
Hawthorne ; but it may properly be drawn in a 
discussion of Stevenson and Mr. Gissing, or of 
Black and Mr. Howells. It is a distinction that 
exists only because of a one-sided development 
or a defective artistic endowment. 

It seems to us that the signs are multiplying 
upon every hand to show that the star of this 
narrower realism is waning, and that the world 
is once more coming to its own in the ideal realms 
of the imagination. Indeed, when we think of 
the other arts, of painting and music for example, 
the sort of thing that we are accustomed to call 
realism appears as a belated parallel of the work 
that found favor in those arts a generation or 
more ago. It illustrates merely an uberwundener 
Standpunkt. When we think how far painting 
has got beyond Frith and the c Derby Day,' when 



The Revival of Romance 165 

we reflect upon the full meaning of the Wagnerian 
triumph, we may with small difficulty, if we are 
anything of a prophet, foresee the time when men 
shall look back upon the petty realism of the past 
score of years with mild wonder at the thought 
that it should ever have been taken so seriously, 
with no other feeling than the curious interest 
that we bring to the contemplation of such pass- 
ing vagaries of thought and taste as the history 
of civilization reveals by the score. The aim of 
art always has been, and always must be, to get 
away from the details of life and to c overhear ' 
its essential expression, to arrange ideal catego- 
ries for familiar facts, to make them symmetrical, 
to classify, and, beyond all else, to exclude. 

What are some of the signs that realism has 
not c come to stay ' in our imaginative literature ? 
It may seem as if M. Zola had the c cry ' just 
now in France, but this is the most superficial 
view imaginable. He has notoriety enough, no 
doubt, but the sources whence it springs will be 
dried up in a few years, and then the bulk of his 
work will sink out of sight by its own specific 
gravity. Who ever wanted to read c L'Assom- 
moir ' or c La Debacle ' a second time, except from 



166 Various Views 

some motive secondary to that of the satisfaction 
that their first reading gave ? But we recur with 
delight to Hugo and Dumas and George Sand, 
and no custom can stale their infinite variety. 
Why have Mr. Sienkiewicz and Signor d'An- 
nunzio achieved lasting reputations in their re- 
spective countries ? The former has done it by 
the pure romanticism of his genius, and the latter 
in spite, not because, of his over-insistence upon 
sordid facts. Why are 'Johannes' and c Hannele ' 
and 'Die Versunkene Glocke' the most strik- 
ing things in recent German literature ? Simply 
because they strike the note of idealism once 
more. Why are the careers of Herr Bjornson 
and Dr. Ibsen so illuminative for our thesis ? 
Because each of these great men presents in 
epitome the artistic experience of the generation. 
That is, because each of them began his work in 
the purest romantic spirit, was for a time led 
astray into the morass of realism, and is now 
groping his way back to the sunlit meadows of 
idealism. And because the former of these men 
never got so far from the true path as did the 
other, the totality of his work will, in the final 
estimate, be held the greater and more enduring. 



The Revival of Romance 167 

In England and America the swing of the 
pendulum toward romanticism is equally evi- 
dent. The exceptional delicacy and charm of 
their workmanship is all that keeps us reading 
the successive productions of Mr. Howells and 
Mr* James. They no longer produce any kind 
of a thrill ; the force by which they once pro- 
duced it is spent. In the w T ork of Mr. Mere- 
dith and Mr. Hardy the elements are so mixed 
that a definite classification is difficult, yet when 
we reflect upon what we best remember in such 
books as * Richard Feverel ' and c Jude the Ob- 
scure/ it is easy to conclude that their authors 
are most effective when least realistic. In our 
more popular fiction, every form of romance is 
illustrated. There is the emotional romance of 
c The Christian/ the fantastic romance of the 
c Zenda * books, the mystical romance of ' Ayl- 
win/ and the historical romance of c The Seats 
of the Mighty.' Other examples, equally typ- 
ical, might be adduced by the score. Such are 
the books that the public delights to read, and 
their production is coming to outnumber over- 
whelmingly all the other kinds of story-books. 
The romantic revival is at full tide, and contem- 



168 Various Views 

porary literature bids fair to offer us once more 
the solace that it brought us of old. We have 
learned that it is extremely foolish to insist of a 
writer that he give us all the facts connected with 
his theme. We have learned the limitations of 
literary photography, we have learned that it is 
unwise to approach literature burdened with a 
sense of responsibility for the preservation of the 
literal truth and the obtrusion of the ethical 
meaning. 



The Great American Novel 169 



THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. 

In one of the most exquisite symbolical tales to 
be found among American writings, Hawthorne 
has dealt with the entertainment of angels un- 
awares, emphasizing a situation as old as liter- 
ature, as old perhaps as the mythology that lies 
back of literature in the childhood of the world. 
Readers of c The Great Stone Face ' will re- 
member how it was prophesied that the features 
carved in the granite of the mountains should 
one day find their counterpart in warm flesh 
among the inhabitants of the Franconian valley, 
and how the hero of the story, looking forward 
to the fulfilment of this prophecy, suffered re- 
peated and bitter disappointment as one famous 
man after another failed to meet the test, him- 
self all unconscious that a life of helpful toil and 
noble aspiration was gradually shaping his own 
features into the desired likeness, and his neigh- 
bors all unwitting of the fact that the long- 
heralded incarnation of the Great Stone Face had 



170 Various Views 

dwelt in their midst from his birth. It has ever 
been the fashion of prophecy, from the days of 
the Delphian oracle down to our own, to get 
fulfilment in unexpected ways ; and it is possible 
that the Great American Novel, of which the 
appearance has so long been prophesied, may 
already have come into existence. Many an 
American critic, jealous for his country's literary 
repute, and eager to assert the final emancipation 
of c these States ' from all old-world tyrannies of 
the ideal, has sought to discern in the works of 
one American novelist or another the typical 
expression of a distinctly American civilization. 
But, unless all preconceptions based upon a 
broad survey of literature are misleading, we are 
forced to disallow the pleas of these over-zealous 
advocates, and to admit that we have not yet 
produced any novelist really representative of 
American society in the sense in which Balzac 
is representative of French, Thackeray of En- 
glish, and Tourguenieff of Russian society. 
Original and charming novelists we have, in- 
deed, in considerable numbers, and they have 
filled our literary picture-gallery with successful 
studies of genre, and fragments of romance, and 



The Great American Novel 171 

bits of quite praiseworthy realism, and fictions 
of character and manners in the greatest variety. 
We have also the full flower of Hawthorne's 
genius, and may rest assured that neither the art 
nor the depth of c The Scarlet Letter ' will be 
far surpassed by the best of those who may rise 
up in the future. But the Great American Novel 
must be broader in scope, if it cannot be truer 
in art, than this tragic idyll of Puritan New 
England, and so the title still seems to await its 
properly authenticated claimant. 

Assuming, then, that the Great American 
Novel has not yet appeared, and that prophecy 
about it is still admissible, let us venture a few 
suggestions concerning its coming and its char- 
acter. We may safely say that it will not come 
with observation. It will not be heralded by the 
puff" preliminary, nor will hosts of rival publishers 
struggle for possession of the manuscript. When 
it is given to the public, we shall not be regaled 
with columns of ingenuous gossip about the per- 
sonality and habits of the author, nor will advance 
extracts be scattered far and wide to whet the 
appetite for the whole magnum opus. It will be 
the book of neither the day nor the month. Its 



i72 Various Views 

originality will puzzle reviewers, and, unable to 
fit it into any of their neat pigeon-holes, they will, 
for the most part, damn it with faint praise, or 
treat it with flippant contempt. We call to mind 
a novel published in this country a few years 
ago, which was accorded very much the sort of 
reception just outlined. If it did not exactly c fall 
flat ' from the press, it at least aroused slight en- 
thusiasm, and soon seemed to have run its course. 
Yet the position of the book in question has 
grown stronger from that day to this. With little 
help from the organs of publicity, it has steadily 
enlarged its circle of readers, and ten years from 
now will probably be reckoned among the note- 
worthy books of the quarter century. We shall 
not name it, for it is not the Great American 
Novel, although it has some of the qualities 
which we expect will characterize that work 
when it appears ; but its history will help us to 
understand the manner in which that eagerly- 
anticipated production is likely to make its way. 
The Great American Novel will be borne to fame 
by no surface ripple of fancy, but by a strong 
undercurrent of intelligent appreciation ; it will 
not win its readers by wholesale, but one at a 



The Great American Novel 173 

time, and each new reader will act as a new 
centre of propagation. When it has at last really 
found and won its fit audience, it will probably 
become the fashion also, and its name will be 
upon the lips of fools, for this penalty of genius 
is always exacted sooner or later. 

So much for the manner of its coming : let us 
now ask what the Great American Novel will 
be like. Since it is to be American, it must needs 
reflect the democratic principle upon which Amer- 
ican society is organized. It cannot rely upon the 
artificial distinctions of the older civilizations to 
give variety to its characters, but must fall back 
upon the distinctions of mind and heart that are 
inherent in human nature. In other words, it 
must command a deeper psychology than the 
European novelist needs to give interest to his 
book. Without being in any way polemical, it 
must be imbued with the passion of democracy, 
based throughout upon the stout-hearted convic- 
tion that democracy is the only rational form of 
government, the only system of social organiza- 
tion that has logical finality. But this implicit 
democracy which informs the book must be puri- 
fied from the faults and the excesses of the demo- 



174 Various Views 

cratic spirit as now manifested in our national life. 
It must be a democracy that is freed from arro- 
gance, that has substituted idealism for its pres- 
ent dull materialism, and that has learned the 
lesson of reverence. 

We should say that the political motive must 
figure among the leading motives of the Great 
American Novel. Without being a political novel 
pure and simple, it must give adequate expression 
to an instinct in the possession of which even the 
Greeks did not surpass us, an instinct which is 
in the very marrow of our bones. It may be to 
superficial seeming a novel of domestic concerns, 
yet it must receive color and strength from the 
political motive, and thereby touch one of the 
most responsive chords of our national conscious- 
ness. Its ethical motives must be worthy of a 
nation whose civilization is based upon Puritan- 
ism, and whose history is a standing testimony to 
the assimilative force of Puritan ideals. It must 
give to social phenomena their true ethical rating, 
and exalt — to use Schopenhauer's classification — 
4 that which one is ' above that which he pos- 
sesses, or that which he appears in the popular 



The Great American Novel 175 

estimation. It must make the reader feel how 
far the true aristocracy of heart and intellect over- 
shadows all the sham aristocracies of wealth and 
of social position won by c smartness,' that dis- 
tinctively American vice. It must enforce — but 
always by implication rather than precept — the 
Goethean lesson that he alone deserves life ard 
freedom who wins them day bv day ; and the 
other Goethean lesson — so peculiarly applicable 
to a country where degenerate sons so often take 
the place of sturdy ancestors — that we must earn 
anew the inheritance left us by our fathers, if we 
would really possess it. 

That some such ideas as these should inform 
the novel that shall be a reflection of what is best 
and deepest in American life seems an almost 
inevitable deduction from our national history and 
circumstances. But the Great American Novel 
must be no mere setting of philosophical abstrac- 
tions. It must, it is true, strike deep root in the 
soil that the centuries have prepared for our 
civilization, but it must at the same time be a 
concrete and vital presentation of certain indi- 
vidual lives as they are lived, or conceivably 



176 Various Views 

might be lived, at the present day. Such a novel 
is under bonds to be an epic of individualism, for 
democracy, if it means anything, means la car- 
riere ouverte aux talents, means the fullest oppor- 
tunity for the development of the individual. 
Our imagined work must have a hero and a 
heroine, each a typical figure ; and it would be a 
fascinating task to attempt their characterization 
in outline. But this task would savor of creation, 
and is not for the critic to assume. Yet we will 
go so far as to borrow from the poets two sugges- 
tions, one for the man, the other for the woman. 
Is it too much to say that Emerson adumbrated the 
hero of our search when he wrote the simple lines 
that stand as a motto for the essay on c Culture ' — 

( Can rules or tutors educate 
The semigod whom we await ? 
He must be musical, 
Tremulous, impressional, 
Alive to gentle influence 
Of landscape and of sky, 
And tender to the spirit touch 
Of man's or maiden's eye : 
But, to his native centre fast, 
Shall into Future fuse the Past, 
And the world's flowing fates in his own mould 
recast.'' 



The Great American Novel 177 

And may we not fancy our heroine to be the 
realization of such a type as is foreshadowed in 
the closing pages of Tennyson's c Princess,' such 
a woman as shall set herself to the hero c like 
perfect music unto noble words/ yet remain as 
distinctly woman as he is distinctly man ? 



12 



178 Various Views 



THE NOVEL AND THE LIBRARY. 

The great preponderance of works of fiction 
among the books drawn from public libraries 
has always been a suDject of much concern to 
librarians and other men engaged in the business 
of public education. It comes up for discussion 
perennially, and various are the suggestions made 
for the correction of what is generally recognized 
as an evil. While there is nothing to say against 
the practice of reading fiction, abstractly con- 
sidered, there is much to say against the novel- 
reading habit which seems to be fastened upon 
the majority of those who use our public libra- 
ries. When the statistics of circulation show that 
works of fiction constitute from fifty to eighty per 
cent of the books that are taken for home read- 
ing, there is certainly some reason to think that 
the library is regarded as a source of entertain- 
ment rather than of public education, and some 
reason to question the wisdom of taxing the peo- 
ple at large for such a purpose. Even if careful 



The Novel and the Library 179 

consideration of the whole subject convinces us 
that a library, put chiefly to such uses, is better 
than no library at all, and still on the whole a 
worthy object of public support, it is certainly 
obligatory upon those who control the supply of 
free books to use all possible vigilance in min- 
imizing the evil of thoughtless reading, and in 
encouraging the literary and studious tastes of 
readers. 

Very often the statistics themselves disguise 
the evil which they connot wholly conceal. A 
library which reports sixty per cent of fiction 
among the books circulated will very likely re- 
port also from ten to fifteen per cent of juvenile 
literature (most of which is fiction), and from five 
to ten per cent of books in foreign languages, 
of which novels form the larger fraction. Some 
librarians regard this condition of affairs with 
complacency, and, while seizing every opportu- 
tunity that is offered to encourage the reading of 
serious books, still hold to the view which was 
advocated by the late W. F. Poole — the view 
that most of these novel-readers would read 
nothing at all unless they could get what they 
wanted, and that it is well for them to acquire 



180 Various Views 

the reading habit even if a wiser judgment dis- 
approves of their habitual selection of books. 
There is much to be said for this view, and for 
its corollary that the exercise of the reading habit 
in any form tends to bring about a gradual ele- 
vation of literary taste, especially if the reader 
be supplied all along with gentle and unobtrusive 
incitements to the acquisition of better standards 
and broader interests. This sort of stimulus has 
to be applied tactfully, and it is a distinctive 
characteristic of the good librarian that he knows 
how to apply it with judgment and without ruf- 
fling the reader's temper. The natural man, who 
has outgrown the years of tutelage, resents being 
practised upon by others for his own good, and, 
although he may be led to the water, he must be 
left to believe that he is drinking it of his own 
volition. 

The subject of fiction in the public library 
has recently come up for renewed discussion in 
connection with a report from Springfield, Massa- 
chusetts, according to which the librarian, during 
four years, has reduced the circulation of fiction 
by about one-fourth. This may not seem strange 
news to the general reader, but to those who know 



The Novel and the Library 181 

anything of library work from its professional side, 
the report is so startling that it seems almost sen- 
sational. One librarian says it is what Lord 
Dundreary would have called a c staggerer.' Ex- 
perience shows the percentage of fiction to be so 
nearly uniform from year to year that a change of 
as little as five per cent would excite comment. 
Naturally, then, a change (and for the better) of 
something like five times that percentage is a 
cause for both surprise and curious interest. By 
just what means so great a reduction of novel- 
reading has been brought about we do not know, 
but so gratifying a result is sure to excite the 
spirits of both inquiry and emulation in the breasts 
of librarians all over the country. 

There are many devices of the obvious sort 
for the lowering of the percentage of fiction and 
the raising of the percentage of serious reading, 
and these have been used by all good librarians in 
the United States during the quarter-century that 
librarianship has been recognized as one of the 
professions. They include such things as the lim- 
ited supplying of novels and the liberal supplying 
of better books, the publication of annotated and 
descriptive lists upon special subjects, the cooper- 



182 Various Views 

ation of librarians with teachers in the work of 
the schools, the opening of the library shelves to 
easy access on the part of the public, and the 
judicious use of personal counsel on the subject 
of reading. But there seems to be a rather 
narrow limit to the efficacy of any of these de- 
vices, or of all of them together ; if they have 
proved adequate to effect the reduction reported 
from Springfield, the case is as surprising as it is 
exceptional, and few librarians will be hopeful of 
accomplishing similar results by such means. 
What we wish now to consider are certain 
methods of a farther-reaching and more radical 
sort that have either been put into operation of late 
years here and there, or that have been suggested 
by the recent revival of interest in the discussion. 
j Mr. Herbert Putnam, who by virtue of his 
official position is the leader of the profession of 
librarianship in America, makes a suggestion that 
may be pronounced radical, but that commends 
itself to the sober intelligence after the first shock 
of surprise is over. It is, simply, that no works 
of fiction be purchased by public libraries for at 
least a year after publication. Nothing could be 
more sensible than the following words : 



The Novel and the Library 183 

1 There is, however, a demand for fiction which I do 
not believe can legitimately be met by the public library. 
That is the demand for the latest new novel merely be- 
cause it is the latest new novel. We all read current 
novels also and enjoy and profit by them. But the de- 
mand for them is largely artificial, for a purpose merely 
social, and it is apt to be transitory No free library can 
meet it adequately, and the attempt to meet it is an 
expense and annoyance to the reader and expense and 
burden to itself. 1 

The exclusion of the newest fiction from the 
library shelves would doubtless occasion a great 
outcry, but the loss to the public would be more 
imaginary than real. Every librarian knows how 
hollow is the pretence of meeting the popular de- 
mand for the novels of the day. To supply that 
demand would entail an expenditure that no 
librarian could sanction. Take such a novel, 
for example, as c The Crisis,' and such a library, 
for example, as that of Chicago. Probably five 
hundred people were daily clamoring for that 
particular novel during the weeks that immedi- 
ately followed its publication. To satisfy them, 
it would have been necessary to purchase several 
thousands of copies, with the absolute certainty 
that next year they would be collecting dust upon 
the shelves, if not actually consigned to the 



184 Various Views 

lumber-room. The satisfaction of an ephemeral 
fancy of this sort is an absolutely illegitimate de- 
mand to make upon any public library. The 
only library that has a right to spend money in 
this reckless fashion is the private enterprise of 
the Mudie type, which exists for the special 
purpose of catering to the taste of the moment. 
What such a library as the Chicago institution 
actually does in the case of a novel like c The 
Crisis' is to purchase forty or fifty copies of the 
work, and supply one applicant out of every two 
or three hundred. 4 In proposing to supply such 
a novel,' says Mr. Putnam, c the library deludes 
the public and reduces its capacity for service 
really serviceable.' It does not really supply 
the demand, and succeeds only in gratifying an 
occasional applicant at the cost of creating ex- 
asperation in the breasts of the thousands who, 
knowing that the book is in the library, ask for 
it from day to day until they desist from sheer 
weariness. 

We are inclined to think, on the whole, that 
every public library would be well-advised in 
adopting Mr. Putnam's suggestion, thus forcing 
its patrons to take, as far as the library is con- 



The Novel and the Library 185 

cerned, Emerson's well-known advice against 
reading books that have not kept alive for at 
least a year. Using c The Crisis' once more for 
our illustration, it is safe to say that in a few years 
the demand for that excellent story will have 
fallen to normal proportions. It will still be asked 
for by a few people, and it will be as proper to pro- 
vide copies to be read as it is proper to provide 
copies of c The Spy.' This, of course, presents 
an extreme case, for, besides the two or three 
novels that a capricious public marks for its favor 
every season, there are two or three hundred 
others of merit sufficient to entitle their claims 
to be recognized. But the reasoning to be em- 
ployed is similar in all the cases ; the demand 
for current fiction is essentially temporary and 
artificial, and it is doubtful if it be the policy of 
wisdom to put into a public library any books 
for which there may not be some reasonable de- 
mand year after year. 

The librarian who is unwilling to make him- 
self disliked by refusing to supply the public 
with current novels may find a sort of way out 
of the difficulty by adopting a plan which has 
already been successfully operated in a few 



186 Various Views 

places. This is the plan of opening a special 
department of new fiction, buying enough books 
to meet the demand, and making a small charge 
for their use. The doctrinaire objection that all 
the services of a public library must be free may 
be met by stating the obvious fact that this par- 
ticular service is impossible unless it be made 
self-supporting. The fee might be a very small 
one — much less than that charged by private 
libraries — and yet sufficient to make the books 
thus circulated pay for themselves. The aver- 
age novel costs the library rather less than one 
dollar ; it may be in constant use for a year or 
more before it is worn out ; if it is made to bring 
in two cents a week during that year, the trans- 
action will be fair to all parties — no appreciable 
burden, certainly, upon the reader, and no burden 
upon the budget except on the score of library 
service. At the end of the book's career, it will 
have provided entertainment for possibly fifty 
families, at practically no cost to the library; it 
will have paid for itself, and may be thrown 
away with a good conscience. If the public 
library is, in any real sense, to provide its patrons 
with the latest novels, we believe that this is the 



The Novel and the Library 187 

only legitimate way of doing it. But we are 
sufficiently tainted with the educational theory 
of the library to think Mr. Putnam's plan, after 
all, the one better deserving to be pursued. 

The two suggestions thus considered are the 
only ones that go to the root of the matter. 
Other suggestions are of the nature of ingenious 
devices or persuasive methods. One of the 
best of them is the two-card system which gives 
every card-holder the right to draw two books 
at the same time, only one of which may be a 
work of fiction. This encourages collateral 
reading of the serious kind, and is said to secure 
good results. Practical librarians are now gen- 
erally learning how much good may be done by 
such things as open shelves, special bibliographies 
of timely interest, talks with teachers and school 
children, object-lessons in model collections of 
standard literature, the encouragement of clubs 
and study-classes, and the judicious selection 
of the fiction that is provided for circulation. 
These means are all praiseworthy, and are, 
in their aggregate emplovment, productive of 
marked benefit. And, in all this discussion, it 
must not be forgotten that the reading of good 



188 Various Views 

fiction is something more than entertainment, 
that it is a study of one of the great forms of 
creative literature, and one of the most potent 
agencies whereby the sympathies may be quick- 
ened, the horizon enlarged, the higher interests 
aroused, and culture attained. We have forever 
passed the day when thoughtful people could 
condemn the reading of fiction as such - y we 
have come to understand for good that the best 
novels are among the best books there are, how- 
ever much we may deprecate the reading of the 
shallow and sensational sorts of fiction. 



The Drama as Art 189 



THE DRAMA AS ART. 

Every now and then, the consciousness of that 
section of the public which is provided with such 
uncomfortable things as ideals becomes stirred to 
the pitch of indignation in contemplation of the 
degradation to which some form of artistic en- 
deavor is subjected by the hard conditions that a 
commercial age ever seeks to impose, and usually 
succeeds in imposing, upon the production of the 
art in question. At one time it is literature, at 
another music, at still another painting that comes 
up for discussion ; again, thanks to the stimulus 
of a lecture by Mr. Israel Zangwill, it is dramatic 
art upon which the fierce light of criticism beats. 
That the art of the playwright will be bettered 
by this light — or, to vary the metaphor, by the 
destructive distillation of the accompanying heat 
— is more than doubtful ; but it is well that some 
one should from time to time call public atten- 
tion sharply to the low estate into which the stage 
has fallen, for if the ideal find no spokesman 



igo Various Views 

when hardest pressed, its condition is indeed 
hopeless. Mr. Zangwill, who has thrown him- 
self bravely into the breach, deserves warm grati- 
tude for what he has been saying, and we trust 
will keep on saying, for the substance of his con- 
tention is of demonstrable nature, and the eternal 
years of God belong to the truths that are being 
given so pointed an expression. 

Like all speakers of the unvarnished truth, 
Mr. Zangwill finds that his message is anything 
but acceptable in many quarters. To say noth- 
ing of the wounded susceptibilities of dramatic 
managers, and of the men who fabricate the kind 
of play that the managers want, the journeymen 
who write c dramatic criticism' for the newspaper 
press are quite comically outraged by his out- 
spoken remarks. Many of them have been saying 
much the same thing, in a more guarded way, all 
along ; but they profess themselves outraged by 
the antics of this bull in the china-shop of modern 
vaudeville, and cheap farce, and tawdry melo- 
drama. They would roar you as gently as any 
sucking-dove, but they would not for the world 
speak the plain truth in plain words ; and as for 
the scintillating words and keen thrusts that flash 



The Drama as Art 191 

from Mr. Zangwill's armory, they are wholly 
incapable of forging and wielding the needed 
weapons. Indeed, the lot of these gentlemen 
who write about the nightly happenings of the 
stage is no pleasant one. They have to deaden 
whatever artistic conscience they may possess, to 
invent euphemistic phrases for the characterization 
of bad plays, to pretend that the contemporary 
English stage is interesting when they know in 
their heart of hearts that it is not, and, above all, 
to simulate a virtuous and fiery indignation when 
some dramatist of genius traverses the petty con- 
ventions of an artificial seemliness and probes 
human life to its depths. The treatment accorded 
to Dr. Ibsen during the past ten years by nearly 
all newspaper critics stands in everlasting and 
shameful evidence of their shallow incompetence 
as a tribe. 

We are glad, then, that Mr. Zangwill has 
stirred the waters in which these criticasters dis- 
port themselves, and has called widespread public 
attention to a few home truths concerning plays 
and playgoers. He has said nothing new about 
the subject — there is nothing new to say — but 
he has placed a pretty wit at the service of a few 



ig2 Various Views 

of the old ideas, and some of his observations are 
pointed enough to pierce the utmost thickness of 
the Philistine hide. There is penetrative energy 
in such phrases as the following : c The modern 
receipt for a successful play is a paying compound 
of snivel, drivel, and devil.' c The old actors are 
dead and buried, but the plays are dead and 
printed. You can buy them at the price of eggs, 
twenty-five cents a dozen, and they are mostly 
bad. 5 'The critic no more represents the simple 
and occasional playgoer than a congressman rep- 
resents the baby he kisses.' The taste of these 
sayings is dubious, but an exhibition of bad taste 
is no new thing to Mr. Zangwill's readers. Free 
from this reproach are such acute sayings as 
these : c Irving's respect for Tennyson is unique 
in the history of the stage — and of Irving.' 
c Ibsen's ink often runs in the veins of his char- 
acters.' c The French stage has never lost its 
literary tradition. We have legitimatized its chil- 
dren, we have turned its intrigues into flirtations ; 
but such virtue has its own reward.' The lec- 
ture from which these excerpts are made is a sort 
of Gatling gun of epigrams, and its deadly fire is 



The Drama as Art 193 

'V 

sustained for more than an hour with but brief 
pretermissions. 

The essential contention of this censor of a 
degraded art is that our playmongers are apt to 
forget that it is a form of art with which they 
are concerned. When we think what the drama 
has been as a factor in civilization, when we re- 
call the noble uses to which the stage has been 
put in other times and lands, when we reflect 
upon the possibilities, for instruction and edifica- 
tion, of the play which is conceived as something 
finer than a means of amusement, we cannot but 
view with contempt the English play which we 
get from the theatrical syndicate and the c bad 
shopkeepers ' of Mr. Zangwill's invective. And 
when we realize that the drama is still treated as 
a fine art in France and Germany, in Spain and 
Italy, in Russia and Scandinavia, while in the 
English-speaking countries alone it has fallen to 
a level which makes meaningless any mention of 
art in its discussion, we may well bow our heads 
with shame. This is a general truth of which 
there is no effective denying, for the occasional 

manager of high ideals and the occasional play 
13 



194 Various Views 

of literary quality serve only to emphasize the 
pass to which the majority of plays and managers 
have come. It is no more than the simple truth 
to say that our audiences do not want ideas in 
their plays; they want costumes, and tricks of 
stage-carpentry, and farcical situations; they are 
hugely delighted by a catchy song or an utterly 
irrelevant dance ; they will tolerate sentiment if 
not too delicate, and even passion if its origin be 
not too deep within the soul ; but ideas they will 
not have on any terms. 

Is our popular artistic standard lower in mat- 
ters pertaining to the stage than it is in matters 
that concern the other forms of art endeavor ? 
Mr. Zangwill thinks that it is ; but we are not 
so sure. It is popular taste in c literature' that 
makes possible the existence of the class of news- 
papers that so disgrace American civilization. 
Surely the stage, at its basest, can do no worse 
than that. If we seem to set up a higher stand- 
ard for books than we do for plays, it must be 
remembered that the bad play forces itself more 
obtrusively upon public attention than the bad 
book. People view the former in public, as it 



The Drama as Art 195 

were, and it is discussed in the public press ; 
whereas the latter is read in private, and the 
critic usually ignores it altogether. Beneath the 
lowest stratum of books that are thought deserv- 
ing of mention by newspaper reviewers, there is 
a still lower stratum that makes up the chief 
reading of countless thousands of people, as far 
as they read books at all. But the theatres that 
provide the corresponding forms of cheap senti- 
ment and vulgarity are conspicuous in the public 
eye, and have their place in the daily or weekly 
theatrical summaries. We doubt, then, very 
much if the taste of the real public be any better 
in its reading than in its acting. When we con- 
sider music, painting, and sculpture, much the 
same principles hold true. As in literature, so in 
the case of these arts, we can never learn what 
the masses really like, because we cannot readily 
catch them (as we can at a theatre) in the act of 
what stands to them for aesthetic contemplation. 
But from the popularity of certain forms of 
music, and of certain forms of the graphic arts, — 
forms in which imbecility and vulgarity seek to 
outrival each other — we may at least shrewdly 



196 Various Views 

surmise that the taste of the dear public is here, 
as with books and plays, in almost equally evil 
case. 

Yet when all is said, one important consider- 
ation remains. In literature, the finest forms of 
art are accessible to everybody. This statement 
is also measureablv true of music, and painting, 
and sculpture. One can to a considerable ex- 
tent come to understand the ideals of these arts 
by the study of photographs and scores. At all 
events, the large cities afford actual examples of 
the highest achievements of these arts. But even 
the large cities rarely, if ever, afford to the spec- 
tator examples of what the art dramatic at its 
highest can do. Thev mav show us marvellous 
stage-effects, but thev do not show us sincerity 
of purpose and unitv of artistic endeavor. In 
this respect, it is true that in England and x\mer- 
ica the drama stands upon a lower level than the 
other arts. We can all read the greatest liter- 
ature at home ; we can often hear the greatest 
music perfectly performed ; we can view some 
of the greatest works of painting and sculpture 
in the originals and all of them in trustworthy 



The Drama as Art 197 

reproduction ; but we cannot witness such pro- 
ductions of the great plays as are to be witnessed 
in the theatres of the European Continent. Our 
productions may cost a great deal more 5 and be 
more dazzling to most of the senses, but they 
do not make art their foremost consideration, 
and they justify the reproach that in our time 
has fallen upon the English-speaking stage. 



198 Various Views 



THE ENDOWED THEATRE. 

The recent visit of Mr. William Archer to this 
country, for the purpose of making a close study 
of theatrical conditions on our side of the Atlan- 
tic, has resulted in a highly instructive series of 
papers for the English periodical which commis- 
sioned him to make the investigation, and has 
also called fresh attention to, and evoked fresh 
discussion of, a number of old questions con- 
nected with the art of the dramatist and theatrical 
manager. Mr. Archer is himself peculiarly well- 
equipped for such a task as he has undertaken. 
Among English dramatic critics he occupies a 
high place. He has both knowledge and sober- 
ness, and these qualities combined make him a 
far more significant writer of dramatic criticism 
than the effeminately whimsical Mr. Beerbohm, 
the sensationally sentimental Mr. Scott, and the 
audaciously paradoxical Mr. Shaw. Even the 
writing of Mr. Walkley, brilliant and fascinating 
as it is, lacks the solidity of Mr. Archer's criti- 



The Endowed Theatre 199 

cism, because it does not seem to be as firmly 
based upon the fundamental principles of dramatic 
art, or as widely conversant with the modern 
literature of the play. 

Among the many evils connected with the 
English-speaking stage of our own time, Mr. 
Archer marks out the c actor-manager,' the c star 
system,' and the c long run' for his most em- 
phatic denunciation. In the address which he 
gave in this country before the Twentieth Cen- 
tury Club of Chicago and Columbia University 
of New York, he sought to answer the question, 
c What can be done for the drama ? ' and bore 
down upon these three evils with much weight. 
We imagine, however, that for his audiences 
upon these two occasions he was slaying the 
slain, for our cultivated public hardly needs to be 
persuaded that stars and long runs and actor- 
managers are directly inimical to ail artistic 
endeavor for the betterment of our theatrical 
conditions. We are as familiar as Englishmen 
are with the bad influence of these things, — or, 
if w T e have not suffered as much from the actor- 
manager, we have for our very own the additional 
evil of the c theatrical syndicate,' which more 



200 Various Views 

than tips the scale (this to be taken ironically) in 
our favor. 

We must, however, hasten to dislodge from 
the minds of our readers the notion that Mr. 
Archer was merely destructive in his criticism. 
Nothing could be farther than this from the truth. 
Unlike Mr. Zangwill, our English visitor of a 
little earlier date, who dealt with the same gen- 
eral subject of the low theatrical estate of England 
and America, Mr. Archer had definite things to 
propose. And if his address was without the 
pointed epigrams and the flashes of humor that 
made Mr. Zangwill so entertaining a speaker, it 
provided ample compensation for the lack of 
those superficialities in its rational suggestions, 
enforced as these were by examples of what other 
countries have actually ' done for the drama.' 
In a general way, Mr. Archer was for the estab- 
lishment of an endowed theatre, but with a dif- 
ference from the usual speculations upon this 
subject, in that the suggested endowment was to 
be private rather than municipal, a matter for the 
voluntary enterprise of subscribers rather than for 
the forced enterprise of tax-pavers. Considered 
from the point of view of probability, we agree 



The Endowed Theatre 201 

with Mr. Archer in looking forward to a private 
rather than a public endowment, although we 
think it would be entirely proper for the munici- 
pality to act in such a matter. And we need 
hardly remind our readers that we have always 
advocated the endowed theatre, as we have always 
urged the desirability of the endowed newspaper. 
One of these days, moreover, the idea is going 
to take practical shape in the mind of some phil- 
anthropist, who will prefer to make his gift to 
the public in this way rather than to establish a 
new hospital or art gallery or public library. 

Mr. Archer spoke at considerable length of 
the successful way in which certain German 
theatres — notably the Deutsches Theater of 
Berlin and the Volkstheater of Vienna- — have 
dealt with this problem of supplying the c inner 
public ' — the public which wants good art, which 
demands that ideas shall be set above accessories 
in its plays — with its dramatic entertainment. 
There is no reason why such theatres, the product 
of endowment and subscription, should not be 
duplicated in our own country, and even prove 
successful as commercial enterprises, no reason, 
that is, unless it be that our own c inner public ' 



202 Various Views 

is not large enough. There is the rub, no doubt. 
The German public, the French public, the 
Italian public, the Scandinavian public, all con- 
trive, in any city of considerable or even moderate 
size, to support a stage in healthful activity, and 
this is just what the English public has hitherto 
failed to do. They have a good inherited tradi- 
tion \ we have cared so little for ours that we 
have lost it altogether. Mr. Henry Fuller, who 
has said some unpalatable things about our lack 
of artistic aptitudes, would probably observe (in 
his not too serious way) that it is not in us, 
racially or temperamentally, really to care for 
dramatic art, or to foster it in the fashion of the 
Continental peoples. Perhaps it is not ; but the 
experiment is worth trying, and as long as it re- 
mains untried, we shall have hopes. The sav- 
ing element of the situation may not impossibly 
come from the fact that we are not as English 
a people as our name implies; that we have so 
much admixture of other strains as to make the 
case a new one, not to be judged by the analo- 
gies of the past. Our immigrants often practice 
segregation themselves, but their children be- 
come pretty well blended into the common 



The Endowed Theatre 203 

American nationality, and who can tell a priori 
just what aptitudes and potentialities will char- 
acterize the resulting race. 

What we want of our stage, and what we be- 
lieve will be given us at no distant day, at least 
in our largest cities, by endowment or otherwise, 
is, in a word, this : We want a playhouse with 
no stars, no popular successes, no waste in the 
form of expensive unessentials. We want upon 
the boards of this playhouse a body of trained 
and conscientious actors, capable of playing 
many parts every year, bound to the institution 
both by loyalty to its fundamental idea and by 
such material inducements as shall insure an 
honorable career and a comfortable retirement. 
We want this playhouse to have a repertory of 
the most varied sort, catholic enough to include 
every genre of meritorious dramatic writing, but 
rigorously excluding what is sensational, childish, 
or merely vulgar. We want it to present the 
classical drama of English and foreign literatures 
frequently enough to give those who wish it an 
opportunity to become acquainted with the mas- 
terpieces of ancient and modern dramatic art. 
We want it to be constantly on the lookout for 



204 Various Views 

promising works by new writers, extending to 
them the frankest recognition, yet never making 
a fad of any one of them, or any school of them. 
We want it to be both grave and gay, a place to 
which we may resort for diversion and for edifi- 
cation alike. We want it to be a place in which 
young persons may learn something about life, 
and acquire standards of taste, yet a place from 
which young persons should sometimes be ex- 
cluded, not by administrative prescription but 
rather by the judgment and discrimination of 
their elders. Finally, we want it to be a place 
in which, while nothing is neglected that will 
heighten the legitimate interest of the drama, 
ideas shall be paramount to all other considera- 
tions in the selection and the mounting of the 
pieces to be produced. 

It does not seem to us that the plan thus out- 
lined is beyond the range of the immediately 
practicable. In New York and Chicago cer- 
tainly, in Boston and Philadelphia possibly, the 
public that desires such a theatre is large enough 
to justify its establishment. There must be 
thousands of people in those cities who would 
support such a theatre to the extent of from ten 



The Endowed Theatre 205 

to one hundred dollars each, every year. What 
is needed is the organizing power necessary to 
bring these people into cooperation, with possi- 
bly the stimulus of the provisional gift of a site 
and a building. We notice that Mr. Howells, 
while commenting on the whole favorably upon 
this suggestion, seems to think that the well-to-do 
class of people who would control the manage- 
ment of such a theatre might impose a censorship 
inimicable to the free development of the drama. 
c In a theatre founded or controlled by them, no 
play criticising or satirizing society could be 
favored,' he says, and instances c An Enemy of 
the People,' c Arms and the Man,' c Die Weber,' 
and c Die Ehre,' as plays that could not hope for 
presentation. This seems to us the merest bug- 
bear, and the force of the criticism is certainly 
not increased by the reference to c what has 
happened in some of our higher institutions of 
learning.' Mr. Howells make a much happier 
suggestion when he finds an analogy between 
the subscription theatre and the subscription 
lecture organizations which exist in many parts 
of the country, and which, for a moderate fee, 
give themselves c the pleasure of seven or eight 



206 Various Views * 

lectures during the season, from men who are 
allowed to speak their minds. With a subscrip- 
tion of twenty-five dollars they could have as 
many plays, from dramatists who also spoke 
their minds ; and if the experiment were tried 
in ten or twenty places, we should have at once 
a free theatre, where good work could make that 
appeal to the public which it can now do only on 
almost impossible terms/ 



A Pedagogical Prescription 207 



M. BRUNETIERE'S PEDAGOGICAL 
PRESCRIPTION. 

The visit to this country of M. Ferdinand 
Brunetiere is one of the most important c literary' 
events of recent years. In significance and in- 
fluence, it may be compared only with Matthew 
Arnold's visit of fifteen years earlier; for M. 
Brunetiere is as distinctly the first of living French 
critics as Arnold was of English critics then 
living. This does not in either case mean — it 
never means — that any one man can be an ab- 
solute ruler in the critical domain, or that all of his 
judgments must be taken as finally authoritative. 
But it does mean, with both the Englishman and 
the Frenchman, that an unusually successful 
effort to eliminate the personal equation, and to 
see things as they absolutely are, has invested the 
judgments of these two men with a degree of 
authority hardly to be claimed for any others of 
their generation. 

In one of his New York lectures, M. Brune- 



208 Various Views 

tiere said that no one had followed more anx- 
iously or more disinterestedly than himself the 
French literary movement of the past score of 
years. He then added, in a passage which may 
be taken as the keynote of his entire critical 
career : 

' The first condition of disinterestedness is never to 
follow one's tastes, and to begin by distrusting the things 
which give us pleasure. The most delicious dishes are 
not the. most wholesome; we never fail to distinguish be- 
tween our cooks and our doctors. In the moral world 
the beginning of virtue is to distrust what is most natural 
to us, and the same is true in the intellectual world. To 
distrust what we like is the beginning of wisdom in art 
and literature.' 

These words represent so accurately what has 
always been our attitude toward the fundamental 
doctrine of criticism that we hardly need, in so 
many words, to express our concurrence with 
M. Brunetiere in this all-important matter. That 
the value of literary work must be determined 
with reference to law and not to caprice, that 
the only valid critical judgments are those which 
are free from the taint of subjectivity, and that 
personal opinion represents only a rudimentary 
stage in the development of criticism, are propo- 
sitions that mean substantially the same thing, 



A Pedagogical Prescription 209 

and that it is the first duty of the critic to recog- 
nize and to justify. What is commonly called 
c subjective criticism ' may be, and frequently is, 
reading of the most delightful sort, but it is not 
criticism in any real sense, for its aim is the 
illumination of the recesses of the writer's own 
mind, rather than of the work held up for ex- 
amination. It is always pleasant to follow the 
play of a finely sensitive intellect about some 
production of literary art, but it does not help 
us, except in a very roundabout way, to under- 
stand that production in its essence. 

The function of opinion in criticism is pre- 
cisely what it is in any other branch of science. 
It assists in the framing of hypotheses, which 
may, in their turn, lead us by tentative paths to 
the truth. But to make of opinion an end in 
itself is a procedure as grotesquely inadequate in 
aesthetics as it would be in physics. What would 
be the present position of natural science if its 
masters had remained content with their neat hy- 
potheses, and had spared themselves the arduous 
tasks of modification by experiment and of ulti- 
mate verification ? Gravitation and evolution 
and the conservation of energy were once matters 

14 



2io Various Views 

of opinion, with no binding force whatever. If 
Newton and Darwin and Helmholtz had been 
content to put these things forward as opinions, 
the world would soon have forgotten their names. 
But the opinions became unquestionable truths 
when they were enforced by the application of a 
rigorous scientific method, and we honor the men 
who established them for the very reason that 
those men knew the assertion of opinion to be 
but the beginning of knowledge. 

It is doubtless true that the science of aes- 
thetics offers a peculiarly difficult field for inves- 
tigation, and that critical opinion often requires 
a long time to ripen into knowledge. But we 
must not for that reason imagine that there is 
any finality of opinion, that its character is other 
than transitory or provisional. The subject may 
be illustrated by the history of the reputation of 
every great writer who has been long enough 
before the public to acquire recognition among 
the fixed stars of literature. M. Brunetiere took 
Racine for the special illustration of this thesis. 

* M. France said: " We know only ourselves. What- 
ever you are trying to explain, you are only expounding 
yourself. Shakespeare alone has known Shakespeare.'* ' 



A Pedagogical Prescription 211 

I answered M. France that his argument that we cannot 
go outside of ourselves proves too much, as it applies to 
our knowledge of the physical world as well as to our 
knowledge of other minds, and I added that one of the 
men who knew Victor Hugo least was Victor Hugo. 
M. Lemaitre says: "I have an opinion of Racine. You 
have another. Good, that makes two. Perhaps there 
is another; that makes three. There may be an infinity 
of them. Why should one submit to another? It is 
much more amusing to have three opinions of Racine 
than one, still more amusing to have an infinite num- 
ber. " I answered M. Lemaitre that no doubt there were 
several opinions about Racine, but that he, the master, 
with his elegant, " malicious/ ' and subtle spirit, exag- 
gerated the differences of human opinions. It is certainly 
agreed that Racine is a great man, that he is a higher 
dramatic genius than Voltaire, for instance, and a lower 
one than Corneille, and such general agreements are all 
we need for our kind of criticism/ ' 

Here the discussion ends, as far as Racine is 
concerned ; but the speaker might easily have 
gone on to show that the position of Racine is 
not thus fixed merely because of a practically 
unanimous consensus of opinion, but that this 
consensus itself is the resultant of forces bv 
which the judgment of every serious critic is 
more or less consciously determined, that it fol- 
lows from the very laws of literary art. 

A writer in the New York c Nation' has 



212 Various Views 

undertaken to traverse this fundamental doctrine 

of M. Brunetiere's creed. Taking for his text the 

very paragraph that we quoted at the beginning 

of the present article, he savs that the 'analogy 

of the delicious but unwholesome dishes is a little 

misleading.' He then goes on as follows: 

' The primary object of eating is to nourish the body, 
not to please the palate. . . . With the work of art, on 
the other hand, pleasingness, in the broad sense of the 
word, is the final test of excellence. Its usefulness is to 
please. There is no higher court of appeal, no doctor 
with exact scientific tests who has a right to pronounce 
it good though disagreeable, or bad though acceptable 
to the taste. It is tru.e that the moralist often arrogates 
to himself this right, but he is only a fallible brother 
expressing an opinion. One is a moralist one's self/ 

The shallowness of this reasoning is so apparent 
that it need not be taken very seriously. It is 
the old plea for hedonism transferred to the plane 
of aesthetics, and is defended by the old familiar 
logomachies. We are quite content to admit 
that aesthetic law can have no higher claim to 
authority than moral law, and should even have 
been willing to allow that the moral law was the 
better defined and the more firmly grounded of 
the two. 'One' may be c a moralist one's self,' 
if he please, but the consequences of this sort of 



A Pedagogical Prescription 213 

individualism, if put into practice, are likely to 
be distressing. So, in aesthetical matters, one 
may be a critic one's self, to his heart's content, 
but his position, if he set up his private judgment 
against the collective judgment of the best in- 
formed in a succession of generations, will not 
prove exactly comfortable. 

But our individualist critic practically abandons 
his own position in a passage that soon follows : 

' Of course this reasoning does not apply to the young, 
whose tastes are in the formative stage, or to the men- 
tally indolent who have never reflected on their own 
tastes. In the interest of education such persons may 
very well take to heart the maxim to distrust their own 
taste. But it is hardly to be supposed that M. Brune- 
tiere meant to offer a pedagogical prescription. 1 ' 

Is it not ? In our opinion, that is precisely what 
M. Brunetiere did mean to offer. Most people 
are either young or mentally indolent as far as 
the appreciation of literature is concerned. To 
like a book is one thing, and to know whether 
or not it is a good book, and why, is quite 
another thing. It is the natural man whom M. 
Brunetiere seeks to warn, not the man of trained 
perceptions and sympathies. We presume that 
M. Brunetiere has a great deal of confidence in 



214 Various Views 

his own likes and dislikes, the reason being that 
a strenuous process of analysis has transferred 
them from the plane of prejudice to the plane of 
deliberate and reasoned judgment. And it is 
just because he knows so amply from his own 
experience how great is the difference between 
a prejudice and a judgment, between the likes 
and dislikes of the natural man and those of the 
critic whose historical sense has been developed 
by the widest reading and who has learned to 
substitute scientific method for empiricism, it is 
just because of these facts that he offers us the 
4 pedagogical prescription ' so much needed in 
this country, which has as yet produced but little 
critical writing in the high and true sense of that 
term. 



Critic as Picker and Stealer 215 



THE CRITIC AS PICKER AND 
STEALER. 

Certain of the abuses of contemporary period- 
ical criticism are energetically set forth by Mr. 
William Knight in c The Nineteenth Century.' 
Mr. Knight's paper is entitled c Criticism as 
Theft,' and discusses the various forms of filch- 
ing, more or less disguised, by which the jour- 
nalistic hack gets the attention of the public, 
and profits at the expense of those upon whom 
he preys. The author sometimes strains a point 
to bring the abuse with which he is at . the 
moment occupied under the category of robbery, 
as when he says that the author who makes a 
valuable contribution to literature is entitled to a 
reward, and adds : c If the return of that reward 
is prevented by capricious, or ignorant, or reck- 
less criticism, the critic has stolen from the 
author, quite as truly as if he had robbed him of 
his purse.' But if this practice is not theft, it is 
something quite as bad, and deserves all the cen- 



216 Various Views 

sure bestowed upon it. c The robbery of a just 
reputation is much more serious than is the theft 
of money, or of material property; and the unjust 
praise and the false dispraise of the critic is one 
of the worst kinds of theft that this world has 
had to endure.' Coleridge took much the same 
view of this matter when he thus characterized 
critics of the wantonly malignant type : 

* No private grudge they need, no personal spite: 
The <vi<va sectio is its own delight! 
All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, 
Disinterested thieves of our good name: 
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor's fame.' 

The abuse becomes even more serious when 
not merely ignorance or reckless flippancy, but 
partisanship or personal bias inspires the review 
of some book. This is what Mr. Knight says 
about it: 'Many a review — philosophical, po- 
litical, scientific, theological, and literary — has 
hitherto been tainted with this bias. An a priori 
judgment has been passed on the merits of a 
book which the critic had not read. It has been 
judged by its title, its contents, its preface, or its 
author's name. Every literary man must have 
seen scores of such notices, pert, opinionative, 
shallow, useless; or, on the other hand, fulsome, 



Critic as Picker and Stealer 217 

and therefore worse than useless.' We may 
once more back Mr. Knight's opinion with a 
passage from Coleridge — this time a prose selec- 
tion, but for that none the less vigorous in its 
impeachment. c As soon as the critic betrays 
that he knows more of his author than the 
author's publications could have told him ; as 
soon as from this more intimate knowledge, 
elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the 
slightest trait against the author; his censure 
instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms 
personal insults. He ceases to be a critic and 
takes on him the most contemptible character to 
which a rational creature can be degraded, that 
of a gossip, backbiter, and pasquillant : but with 
this heavy aggravation, that he steals the unquiet, 
the deforming passions of the world into the 
museum; into the very place which, next to the 
chapel and oratory, should be our sanctuary and 
secure place of refuge ; offers abominations on 
the altar of the Muses, and makes its sacred 
paling the very circle in which he conjures up 
the lying and profane spirit.' Anyone who has 
occasion to do much reading in contemporary 
criticism may often discern between the lines of 



218 Various Views 

a review some such syllogism as the following : 
No person holding certain opinions upon politics, 
or art, or religion, can possibly say anything 
worth heeding upon any subject whatsoever. 
N. N. is a person holding such opinions. This 
book of his upon, let us say, hydraulic engineer- 
ing, must therefore receive short shrift and no 
mercy. This illustrates, it is true, an exaggerated 
form of the evil under discussion; a more com- 
mon form is that in which some unimportant 
passages in the book, obnoxious to the critic, are 
singled out for attack, while the substance of the 
work is utterly ignored. 

Another form of current c criticism,' which 
comes nearer than those as yet mentioned to 
being theft in the literal sense, is thus described 
by Mr. Knight : c A critical " notice," written 
to display mere deftness or nimbleness of wit, 
ingenious repartee, power of sarcasm or rejoinder, 
is not criticism at all. Suppose a nimble-witted 
person skims a book ; turning its pages in a list- 
less mood, he finds some information that is new 
to him. He notes this, and goes on to read 
more. He finds some errors, and then proceeds 
to use the information, which he has received 



Critic as Picker and Stealer 219 

from the book itself, against its author ; just as a 
clever surface society-talker, wholly ignorant of 
a subject, can often " pick the brains " of one 
who knows it, while he is speaking, and give him 
back in a torrent of verbosity the very ideas he 
was slowly and modestly expressing.' There is 
a good deal of this sort of fraudulent criticism 
afloat, and some writers acquire a critical reputa- 
tion based almost wholly upon the cleverness 
with which they succeed in ' showing off 5 with 
the subject of some book for a text. The pas- 
sage just quoted reminds us of an incident re- 
cently related. A journalist who had seen a good 
many varieties of life at close quarters spent an 
evening with an eminent novelist. After a while, 
the novelist said to his guest : c I want your opinion 
of a story I have just written.' The story was 
read, and approval duly expressed. c But,' said 
the journalist, c the substance of your story seems 
strangely familiar to me.' c Yes,' replied the 
novelist, c you told me the story yourself.' 

Perhaps the only sort of c criticism ' that may 
in the strictest sense be accounted theft is that 
in which the reviewer relies mainly upon the 
reviews already published by others of his craft. 



220 Various Views 

To parade a§ one's own the opinions of others, 
to catch the drift of criticism as expounded in 
the more authoritative journals, reproducing its 
leading ideas in slightly altered form, is a practice 
for which no defence is possible. The critic who 
takes his profession seriously will, of course, 
carefully refrain from reading what others have 
said of a book until he has framed his own inde- 
pendent judgment of the work in question, and 
even then will have to be constantly on his guard 
to resist the natural impulse to make his dicta 
conform to those which he cannot keep from 
filtering into his consciousness in a hundred in- 
sidious ways. Even the shifting currents of public 
opinion upon the larger aspects of literary art are 
a constant source of danger to the critic, however 
conscientious he may be. When current literature 
shows a distinct trend toward realism, or roman- 
ticism, or didacticism, or sexualism, it is difficult 
to avoid being swayed by the movement, however 
fixed may be the critic's canons, and however 
stoutly he may be prepared to do battle for the 
lasting as against the ephemeral. We still get a 
good deal of bell-wether guidance, even from the 
best-intentioned, for critics are as gregarious as 



Critic as Picker and Stealer 221 

other people, and find it quite as hard to run 
counter to the prevailing literary fashions. 

With one part of Mr. Knight's argument we 
are unable to agree. He condemns the review 
which is frankly descriptive and extractive on the 
ground that it is a theft from both author and 
public ; from the former because it injures his 
sales, from the latter because it deprives of the 
opportunity of knowing, c in its integrity,' what 
the author has to say. It is a curious logical 
twist that can find robbery in the act of summar- 
izing a book for readers many of whom are too 
busy to get at it in any other way. As far as 
our observation goes, such precis-writing stimu- 
lates rather than retards the sale of the books 
selected for treatment; the persons who are con- 
tent to accept the part for the whole are mostly 
those who would never dream of purchasing the 
book concerned, while, on the other hand, the 
number of those who are by a skilful summary 
made curious to know the book, and actually 
purchase it, make up many times over for the 
few w^ho might have become purchasers had it 
not been for the friendly offices of the reviewer 
in selecting for them enough of its contents to 



222 Various Views 

satisfy their curiosity. So far are we from dep- 
recating this form of review, that we wish there 
might be a great deal more of it. More, perhaps, 
than from any other cause, popular criticism 
suffers from the feeling of the critic that, however 
lacking in knowledge, he is bound to take the 
judicial attitude, and, instead of giving his readers 
an idea of what the book is really like, he must 
express a decided opinion upon its merits. As it 
is obviously impossible for the newspaper re- 
viewer, called upon to deal with books upon all 
sorts of subjects, to have an opinion of any value 
concerning most of them, it would be a decided 
improvement for him to remain content with the 
descriptive summary that almost any fairly intel- 
ligent person can make. In other words, the 
work of judical and authoritative criticism should 
be left to the reviews that can command the 
services of hundreds of specialists, and are known 
to entrust to competent hands the books sent to 
such reviews for examination. 



A Word for Minor Poetry 223 



A WORD FOR MINOR POETRY 

The flood of verse that is produced in these 
latter days, and that somehow finds its way into 
print, offers a subject for serious reflection to 
the student of literary phenomena. Nothing like 
it was ever known before, since there never 
before was a period in which mastery of the ele- 
mentary technique of verse was so common a 
possession among workers with the pen. Every 
now and then we learn with surprise that some 
famous scholar, whose reputation rests upon 
strictly prosaic achievements, has often had re- 
course to the composition of poetry as a recrea- 
tion, and has long been dabbling in the art of 
rhyme and metre unknown to any but his most 
intimate associates. A few years ago, Mr. 
Lecky published a volume of verse that de- 
lighted all of its readers except those who based 
their sapient judgment upon the a priori grounds 
that so great a historian could not possibly have 
the poetical gift ; and it was still more recently 



224 Various Views 

that a posthumous volume by the late Professor 
Romanes showed us that the scientific habit of 
thought by no means precludes possession of the 
sympathies and the sensibilities that are requisite 
for the production of very acceptable verse. 
Even the dry light in which the world appeared 
to a man of Huxley's temperament did not pre- 
vent him from penning one of the most striking 
of the many poetical tributes evoked by the 
death of Tennvson. Then, besides the occa- 
sional men of eminence in other intellectual 

i 

fields who from time to time surprise us in this 
agreeable way, there are the writers — a very 
numerous host — who have no other distinction 
at all, but who every year swell the list of those 
who must be reckoned with when we estimate 
the choral forces of English song, far removed 
as they mav be in both aim and achievement 
from the select ranks of the soloists. 

The existence of this choir invisible — that is, 
invisible to the gaze of the general public — is a 
fact persistently borne in upon the consciousness 
of the closer student of contemporary literature. 
The reviewer of books, in particular, whose 
task it is to make some sort of assessment of 



A Word for Minor Poetry 225 

from one to two hundred volumes of new verse 
every year, is acutely aw T are of this multitude of 
singing voices, and, unless he be hopelessly com- 
mitted to a standard of judgment impossible to 
apply in such cases, is bound, in simple fairness, 
to recognize the sweet and sincere quality of 
many of the notes sounded, although he knows 
well enough that these notes will never penetrate 
very far into the popular consciousness. If he 
be honest, his attitude toward these bards strug- 
gling to make themselves heard will not be in- 
spired by a fine Horatian scorn of poetical 
mediocrity so much as by the feeling that a good 
deal may be said in behalf of poetry that is not 
too bright and good for human nature's daily 
food. There are hours — and many of them — 
in our lives when we are content to browse upon 
the meadowlands of song, and leave the peaks 
unsealed. Even the poets that dwell upon the 
lowest slopes of Parnassus may offer some food 
for our spiritual sustenance. 

The term c minor poetry ' is of comparatively 
recent origin, and indicates a definite realization 
of the fact that there is a difference, not of degree 
merely, but of kind, between the singer of the 

15 



226 Various Views 

age or the race and the warbler of the hour or 
the coterie. The distinction between the two is 
reasonably well marked, although in the nature 
of the case no hard and fast line of demarcation 
can be drawn. There are always some poets 
c on promotion/ as it were, poets whose place 
we cannot quite determine because of the heated 
controversies occasioned bv their work. Whit- 
man, for example, was for many years in this 
condition of suspense, and now, long after his 
death, it is quite impossible to say whether he is 
a minor or a major poet. Mr. Kipling may be 
taken as a living illustration of this uncertainty 
of classification. Then there are occasionally 
mute inglorious Miltons, as far as the larger pub- 
lic is concerned, who nevertheless are both vocal 
and glorious in the estimation of the cultured 
few. But the distinction between major and 
minor poets is worth making, in spite of the 
difficulty of dealing with a few exceptional repu- 
tations, and it is coming to be seen more and 
more clearly that the minor poet has a mission 
and an utterance of his own ; or, to supply a con- 
crete illustration, that Mr. Dobson is in no sense 



A Word for Minor Poetry 227 

a rival of Mr. Swinburne, but rather a worker 
in different materials, shaping them to different, 
and, in a way, to equally successful ends. 

If this position be well taken, it will follow 
that there is no reproach in the title of minor 
poet. We do not think slightingly of the blue- 
bird because it is not an eagle, nor do we wrong 
the singer of simple lyrics because he has been 
denied the power to fashion epics or dramatic 
tragedies. When we 

' Read from some humbler poet, 

Whose songs gushed from his heart, 
As showers from the clouds of summer, 
Or tears from the eyelids start/ 

we are not justified in measuring him by the 
standard of Milton and Shakespeare, but should 
rather ask : Does he accomplish what he has 
sought to accomplish; is there a natural balance 
between gift and utterance ; has he power to 
stir the springs of emotion at his own spiritual 
level and upon his own terms ? Some years 
ago, Mr. Slason Thompson published a collec- 
tion of the minor poetry that, in newspaper and 
magazine, had appealed to him for a score of 



228 Various Views 

years past. He styled his collection c The 
Humbler Poets,' and was in consequence, we 
believe, the recipient of more than one indignant 
remonstrance from versifiers who thought them- 
selves anything but humble. But the very fact 
that a c humble ' or minor poet should be too 
proud to accept the ascription, proves, as far as 
it proves anything, that the remonstrant does not 
deserve the title of poet in any sense, that his 
aim has been so far mistaken as to make his 
work relatively a failure. 

Speaking of the c hedgerow poems ' of his col- 
lection, Mr. Thompson said fittingly : c There 
come hours to every lover of poetry when he 
wishes for "some simple and heartfelt lay," some- 
thing that shall speak from out a mind feeling 
the everyday cares of life amid the multitude, 
and not from the heights to which the masters 
"proudly stooped."' Something of this feeling, 
expressed with more of elaboration, and based 
upon more broadly philosophical grounds, may 
be found in the preface to c A Treasury of Minor 
British Poetry ' edited by Mr. J. Churton Collins. 
Here we are told that : 



A Word for Minor Poetry 229 

c It is in the minor poetry of an age that contempo- 
rary life impresses itself most deeply, and finds perhaps 
its most faithful mirror. In the great masterpieces of 
poetry that life is presented in an ideal light, and in 
relation to ideal truth. What belongs to a time is sub- 
ordinated to what belongs to all time, what is actual to 
what is typical, what is local to what is universal. 
There is, moreover, in genius of the higher order a 
dominant, a despotic individuality which tempers and 
assimilates the material on which it works to its own 
potent idiosyncracy.' 

The author then goes on more specifically to 

say that in Langland, not Chaucer, c the England 

of Edward III. becomes fully articulate,' and 

that neither Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, 

completely reflects the England of the period in 

which he lived. 

< It is otherwise with the minor poetry of any particu- 
lar era. Here for the eclecticism, if we may so express 
it, of the great masters the age itself finds a tongue. 
For the voice which speaks in these poets is the voice of 
the nation, of the courtier, of the statesman and man 
of affairs, of the scholar and litterateur, of the Church- 
man, of the man of pleasure, of the busy citizen, of 
the recluse, of the soldier and sailor, of the peasant, of 
the mechanic, and of women of all classes and of all 
callings. What is moulding, what is coloring, what is 
in any way affecting the life of the time has its record 
here. Is the pulse of the nation quickened or depressed} 



230 Various Views 

are imagination and passion, or fancy and sentiment, or 
reason and reflection in the ascendant, is the prevailing 
tendency in the direction of simplicity and nature, or 
towards ingenuity and art, is the moral tone in society 
high or low, is the period a period of progress, or of 
decadence, or of transition, — the answer to all this may 
be found, and found in detail, in our collections of minor 
poetry.' 



Newspaper Science 231 



NEWSPAPER SCIENCE. 

Walter Bagehot, in one of his letters, speaks 
of somebody's books as containing c a pale 
whitey-brown substance, which people who don't 
think take for thought, but it isn't.' All of us 
who do much miscellaneous reading in current 
literature must come to be painfully familiar with 
the substance thus described, and to wonder, on 
the one hand, how it can be evolved from minds 
that seem to work normally in the everyday 
relations of life, and, on the other, how it can 
prove acceptable to the mental palate of so 
many readers, for many readers there must be 
to account for its voluminous and continued 
production. Such an account of the vagaries of 
intellection as is given by John Fiske, in his essay 
upon various kinds of c cranks,' is an amusing 
thing to read, of course, but in another aspect — 
an aspect that persists in the field of vision after 
the humorous one has faded — its effect is sad- 
dening, almost disheartening. Cling as tena- 



232 Various Views 

ciously as we may to a belief in the essential 
rationality of the human intellect, our faith suf- 
fers many a rude shock when we see one form 
after another of irrationalism sweeping over the 
public mind, threatening almost to its founda- 
tions the empire of logic. Illustrations of this 
power of the irrational to set intellects awry 
abound on every hand, and may be drawn alike 
from great things and from small. The irra- 
tionality of imagining that our conduct as a 
nation toward the people of the Philippine 
Islands can be made to square with the prin- 
ciples upon which we have hitherto shaped our 
national life and carved out our success is of a 
piece with the irrationality that claimed the year 
1900 for the first of a new century instead of the 
last of an old one. The former is a matter of 
grave import to countless millions of people; the 
latter is a belated bit of scholasticism; both to 
the psychologist are interesting examples of the 
way in which pure reason gets flouted when it 
runs counter either to a passion or a whim. 

There was a time, not very long ago, when 
we hoped great things from our rapidly expand- 
ing schemes of education, which were to make 



Newspaper Science 233 

for rationality in so many ways. The teaching 
of science, particularly, was to raise up a new* 
generation with a new mental habit. The 
preachers of this gospel said that all our intel- 
lectual ailments proceeded from the fatal defect 
in educational methods that made words rather 
than things the chief object of attention. Some- 
thing analogous to the degeneracy of inbreeding 
was the consequence of the manner in which 
each new generation was content to deal mainly 
with the merely verbal inheritance of the past, 
instead of benefitting by a vivifying contact with 
the concrete facts of nature. Science was to 
change all this, to keep men in constant touch 
with life, leaving the dead past to bury its dead, 
and henceforth to base all our convictions upon 
the solid foundations of observation instead of 
the uncertain indications of authority. Well, 
science has had pretty much its own way in 
education for the past quarter-century, yet the 
generation that it has helped to train seems 
hardly less prone to superstition than were those 
that preceded. Such mockeries of the scientific 
spirit as parade under the names of palmistry and 
psychical research and c Christian ' science, and 



234 Various Views 

countless other manifestations of the unregulated 
intellect, rear their heads unabashed, and bear 
witness to the persistence of the irrational even 
under conditions that would seem the most ad- 
verse to the prosperity of such aberrations of the 
intelligence. 

This flourishing of the unscientific in what is 
commonly supposed to be peculiarly the age of 
science is doubtless the result of instincts too 
deeply seated in the human consciousness to be 
readily accessible to the appeal of educational 
and other rationalizing influences. Yet we can- 
not wholly acquit these influences themselves of 
all responsibility for a state of things so discred- 
itable to human intelligence. Our educational 
methods must somehow be defective, must fail 
in seriousness of application if not in grasp of 
the problem to be coped with, while those ancil- 
lary agencies upon which education has a right 
to count seem to be far removed indeed from 
any adequate realization of their high mission. 
While the church, and the political party, and 
the industrial organization, and the publisher of 
books, and the various kinds of purveyors of 
entertainment to the community, are all in part 



Newspaper Science 235 

answerable for this failure to realize the oppor- 
tunities offered them to contribute to intellectual 
advancement, the most conspicuous offender in 
this respect is that type of the modern newspaper, 
far too frequently met with, which panders to the 
lower intellectual instincts quite as noticeably as 
to the lower social and moral instincts of its 
readers. We wish to emphasize this distinction 
just at present because, although many voices 
have been raised to protest against the low moral 
tone of the greater part of contemporary journal- 
ism, the fact that its intellectual tone is equally 
low has failed to attract the attention due it as a 
commentary upon our boasted success in carrying 
on the work of popular education. 

Mr. J. L. Larned, speaking before the libra- 
rians at Cleveland a few years ago, made use of 
these impressive and well-weighed words : 

« The common school, making possible readers, and 
the newspaper inviting them to read, arrived together at 
a conjunction which might have seemed to be a happy 
miracle for the universalizing of culture in the western 
world. The opportunity which came then into the 
hands of the conductors of the news press, with the new 
powers that had been given them, has never been paral- 
leled in human history. They might have been gar- 
deners of Eden and planters of a new paradise on the 



236 Various Views 

earth, for its civilization was put into their hands to be 
made what they would have it to be. If it could have 
been possible then to deal with newspapers as other 
educational agencies are dealt with ; to invest them with 
definite moral responsibilities to the public 5 to take 
away from them their commercial origin and their mer- 
cenary motive 5 to inspire them with disinterested aims 5 
to endow them as colleges are endowed $ to man them 
for their work as colleges are manned, with learning and 
tried capacity in the editorial chairs — if that could have 
been possible, what imaginable degree of common culture 
might not Europe and America by this time be approach- 
ing ? As it is, we are to-day disputing and striving to 
explain to one another a condition of society which 
shames all who think of it.'' 

We know now that these things were not pos- 
sible, although we believe that they may yet 
become possible, and it is just because we hold 
this belief that it seems important to emphasize 
as frequently and as sharply as we may the con- 
trast between what our newspapers are doing for 
education in the true sense and what thev might 
so easily take it upon themselves to do. And 
in saying these hard truths of a perverted news- 
paper press, we wish to give the frankest recog- 
nition to those journals, found here and"" there, 
whose aims, both intellectual and moral, are en- 
tirely creditable to their publishers, and which 



Newspaper Science 237 

are particularly instructive because they indicate 
the course that others might take to the immense 
benefit of their prestige, and not impossibly also 
to the benefit of their subscription and adver- 
tising accounts. While it is true that some of 
the greatest commercial successes in American 
journalism have been gained by newspapers of 
the most debased and ruffianly description, it is 
also true that the most dignified examples of our 
journalism have proved, if not the most success- 
ful, at least successful enough to gratify any 
reasonable ambition. The choice by no means 
lies between success at the price of decency and 
failure with the preservation of self-respect. 

In order to provide some sort of justification 
for the title given to these remarks, we must 
turn from the foregoing abstract considerations 
to something in the nature of concrete illustra- 
tion. We all know that c newspaper science ' is 
a term of reproach, and the reason is not far to 
seek. The same spirit of sensationalism that 
leads to the detailed chronicling of a prize fight 
or a criminal trial leads also to the exploitation 
of every sort of mental vagary that cloaks itself 
with the -respectable name of science. Whether 



238 Various Views 

it be a belated alchemist who claims to have dis- 
covered the stone of the philosophers, or an 
exponent of the newest and most extravagant 
occultism, whether it be a palmist or a c mind- 
reader ' or a c faith-healer,' whether it be a 
Shaconian or a circle-squarer, or a pyramid en- 
thusiast or a direful prophet with a tale of the 
coming destruction of the world, there is no per- 
son so scientifically impossible that he cannot 
get into the newspapers, and enlist their services 
in the propaganda of his pet eccentricity or insane 
delusion. He can get himself taken seriously, or 
at least semi-seriously, and that is what he wants. 
For all such persons notoriety is the very breath 
of life, and the newspapers provide it without 
scruple, because in so doing they can at the 
same time provide the weak-minded section of 
their readers with a new variety of mental dissi- 
pation. The most incredible inanities, the most 
preposterous notions, the most meaningless 
pseudo-science are thus given a currency that is 
denied even to the genuine achievements of 
investigation. 

This work is done, moreover, in so blundering 
and hap-hazard a way that the spirit of sensa- 



Newspaper Science 239 

tionalism is not enough completely to account 
for it. There is usually in addition some admix- 
ture of an ignorance so dense that one can only 
marvel at the number of essentially uneducated 
people who by some mysterious dispensation get 
their lucubrations into print. We recall a news- 
paper article published in Chicago some years 
ago which undertook to instruct a confiding 
public upon the subject of ozone. The account 
was a brief one, but it contrived to include state- 
ments to the effect that the true nature of ozone 
was not fully understood, that it got its name 
4 from the peculiar odor, which resembles that 
produced when a succession of electric sparks 
are passed through the air,' that Faraday consid- 
ered it c identical with the medicinal quality in 
electricity,' that the effect of inhaling it was very 
4 exhiliatory,' and that M. Jules Verne had once 
told an interesting c story of the wild doings in a 
village which became accidentally permeated ' 
with ozone. This illustration is trivial enough, 
no doubt, but it is so extremely typical of the 
sort of c newspaper science ' we are concerned 
with that it will serve as well as another. The 
wonder of it is, of course, that any person so 



240 Various Views 

absolutely ignorant of elementary chemistry 
should write, and that any newspaper should 
print, so astonishing a farrago of misinformation. 
One more illustration must suffice us. An 
improved method for the liquefaction of air has 
recently attracted much attention, and the news- 
papers have naturally taken it up. The same 
newspaper which was responsible for the remark- 
able statements about ozone to which reference 
was just made quotes the inventor as c stating 
that with three gallons of the liquid he had re- 
peatedly made ten gallons, and that he could go 
on doing so for any length of time.' c There is 
no reason to doubt this assertion ' is the astonish- 
ing editorial comment upon this astonishing state- 
ment. Now if this means that the energy liberated 
from the aerification of a certain quantity of the 
liquefied air is sufficient, without any auxiliary 
energy, to reduce a still larger quantity to the 
liquid form, it is the flattest of impossibilities, for 
it denies the principle of the conservation of 
energy, which is the fundamental principle upon 
which all physical science rests. A schoolboy 
less omniscient than Macaulay's should know 
such a statement to be impossible, and he should 



Newspaper Science 241 

know it with a firmness of conviction that 
should make him willing to stake his life upon 
it. If a schoolboy can get through a common 
high school education without knowing this and 
other universal principles of the same order there 
must have been something radically wrong about 
his instruction. And it is because we are inclined 
to think that there often is something radically 
wrong about the teaching of elementary science, 
that such teaching is too apt to make informa- 
tion rather than intellectual discipline its chief 
aim, that we have wished to provide this moral 
with the sharpest possible of points. 



is 



242 Various Views 



THE DECAY OF AMERICAN 
JOURNALISM. 

There is something touching in a 4 Letter to 
Editors and Journalists' put forth by the c Balti- 
more Yearly Meeting of Friends.' It is an appeal 
for the purification of the newspaper press, and 
the faith must indeed be abundant that imagines 
a few soft words sufficient to arouse in the breast 
of that hardened offender against decency the 
remorseful twinges of conscience. If the aver- 
age American journalist ever had such a thing as 
a conscience, it was killed long ago, and its place 
taken by a simulacrum of hypocritical accent 
and leering mien. This effective modern sub- 
stitute for a conscience in journalism has discov- 
ered the secret of preaching virtue in such a 
manner that it nowise interferes with the practice 
of vice. It will, for example, devote one edito- 
rial column to deploring the brutal tendencies of 
the age, and fill twenty columns of the same 
issue with a highly-colored account, fron? all 



American Journalism 243 

possible points of view, of the latest event in 
the annals of the prize-ring. It will take high 
moral ground upon the evils of partisanship, and 
at the same time gloss over the corruption of 
the party in whose interests its own are wrapped 
up. It will profess to regret — oh, so deeply — 
that the dear public has developed so insatiate 
an appetite for scandalous sensations and vulgar 
personalities, and will at the same time furnish a 
large staff of young men with muck-rakes of 
the most approved pattern, and direct them to 
gather in as many sensations and personalities as 
they can discover or invent, in order that the 
aforesaid dear public may not be deprived of its 
customary diet, and the sales of its favorite family 
newspaper show no symptoms of a decline. 

Revolutions in taste and in the standards of 
public decency are no more to be made with 
rose-water than are revolutions in sterner fields 
thus to be accomplished. Nothing short of the 
energetic measures of a Hercules will suffice to 
cleanse the Augean stables of the c new journal- 
ism,' and we can fancy something of the derision 
with which the rose-water phrases of the Balti- 
more friends will be received by the men who 



244 Various Views 

have been chiefly instrumental in making the 
American newspaper so great a national calamity. 
c We appeal to you, as Editors,' so runs the 
'Letter' from the good women of the Baltimore 
Meeting, c for a reticence in the detail of crime 
and scandal, — that the purely sensational shall 
be excluded, that pictures and advertisements, 
both personal and medical, which so insidiously 
lead the innocent and unsuspecting from the path 
of virtue, shall find no place in your columns. 
We especially ask your influence in raising the 
moral tone of the edition issued as the " Sunday 
paper," till it becomes a power for good among 
the people.' This appeal is reiterated, with some 
variation of phrase, in a c Report' which accom- 
panies the c Letter,' and the pleasant hope is ex- 
pressed that in our journalism henceforth c fairer, 
lovelier paths be traced, leading to virtue and to 
hope.' 

We fear that all the ears that such an appeal 
as this seeks to reach will be found deaf to its 
gentle pleadings. The foul sheets at which it 
aims will continue to do lip-service to whatsoever 
things are good and pure, while disregarding in 
practice every consideration of decency. The 



American Journalism 245 

effective arguments for purified journalism will 
be of a very different sort, and indications are not 
wanting that such arguments are about to be 
employed. The ringing words of the late Gov- 
ernor Altgeld, setting forth the imperative demand 
for legislation that will really protect men from 
wanton assaults upon their character by practi- 
cally irresponsible editors, found an echo in many 
minds, and the bills recently introduced into the 
law-making bodies of Illinois and New York, 
making it an offence to publish portraits without 
the consent of the persons portrayed, have taken 
a step in the right direction. Even the recent New 
York bill proposing a press-censorship, while 
unwise in principle, has made a good many peo- 
ple seriously ask themselves whether an excessive 
measure of restriction might not be preferable to 
the excess of license which now characterizes 
the conduct of our newspapers. c Freedom of 
the press ' has always been, and ought always to 
remain, a watchword of much meaning to any 
liberty-loving people, but its force may be greatly 
weakened by such abuses of that freedom as are 
daily illustrated by the newspapers of our chief 
cities. Still more significant than the attempts 



246 Various Views 

at legislation to which reference has been made 
is the recent action of a number of public libraries 
and clubs in Eastern cities, excluding from their 
reading-rooms the most conspicuously objection- 
able newspapers that are published anywhere in 
the country. Sometimes a movement like this, 
once started, grows far more rapidly than might 
be anticipated, just as crystallization takes place 
in an over-saturated solution when some rallying- 
point is offered for the aggregation of the ready 
molecules. That some such crystallization of 
sentiment on the subject of American journalism, 
its duties and its responsibilities, may soon take 
place is the deep desire of every thinking person 
who has the interests of this country at heart. 

Just as every people has, on the whole, the 
government that it deserves, so it must be ad- 
mitted that every city is responsible for the 
newspapers that it supports, and deserves noth- 
ing better until it is prepared actively to re- 
pudiate the sheets by which it is represented. 
It will not do merely to claim that it is mis- 
represented by them, deploring their dishonesty, 
their vulgarity of tone, and their pernicious 
sensationalism, while at the same time giving 



American Journalism 247 

them the encouragement of subscriptions and 
advertising contracts. Nor are any protests 
likely to avail so long as the man who has ac- 
quired wealth in the pursuit of disreputable 
journalism is permitted to associate with gen- 
tlemen, to figure as a leading citizen at public 
gatherings, to enjoy the freedom of the club 
and the communion of the church. When the 
public conscience is sufficiently quickened to 
recognize the fact that such a man is a moral 
outcast, that his newspaper pollutes the home, 
that to purchase it upon the street-corner is a 
direct encouragement of its vicious practices, 
and that to use its columns for advertising pur- 
poses is to pay too great a price for commercial 
gain, when these things come to be recognized 
— not as counsels of perfection but as working 
maxims for the conduct of daily life — we may 
hope for a return to the more dignified and 
decent journalistic methods of the past genera- 
tion, and for the assimilation of our press to the 
ethical standards that are upheld as a matter of 
course in most other parts of the civilized world. 
If the time ever comes when those standards 
shall obtain in American journalism, our news- 



248 Various Views 

paper press will have found its real mission, and 
may become, what it certainly is not now, a 
potent agency of enlightenment and a pillar for 
the support of republican institutions. Intelli- 
gent citizens everywhere would be only too glad 
to look to the newspaper for both light and 
leading ; at present, instead of shedding light, 
it darkens counsel by words without knowledge, 
and instead of leading opinion, it is prone to 
follow the uncertain guidance of every blind 
popular prejudice and every brutal fanaticism 
that sways the masses of its readers. Its once 
considerable influence has so waned that its 
boasts of power excite only the derision of the 
well-informed ; its pretended statements of fact 
are so untrustworthy that few people place any 
confidence in them ; its opinions are not taken 
seriously because nobody supposes that they are 
reached by a process of serious reasoning. If a 
newspaper of the typical sort perchance cham- 
pion a good cause, few will be found to believe 
in the sincerity of its attitude, for its champion- 
ship of bad causes has long since made it an 
object of suspicion, if not of contempt. 

The darkest hour is that which just precedes 



American Journalism 249 

the dawn, and perhaps the dawn of a purified 
journalism is nearer at hand than we suppose. 
The legal maxim that wherever there is a griev- 
ance there is a remedy may prove valid in the 
wider ethical field wherein this foe must be grap- 
pled with. Whether the remedy come from 
within or without, whether it be an organic 
process of regeneration or a surgical operation 
does not matter so much ; what does matter is 
the undeniable fact that many of the newspapers 
published in our large cities are so devoid of 
principle that they constitute a perpetual menace 
to every genuine interest of our civilization. 
We need not single out those journals that stand 
as honorable exceptions to this general statement, 
nor those other journals that are kept from the 
state of grace by weakness rather than by will ; 
their editors and their friends will know that these 
remarks are not meant for them. But no words 
of condemnation can be too strong for the news- 
papers that subordinate all other aims to the aim 
of enlarging their circulation and their adver- 
tising patronage, that care nothing for the truth 
and only enough for decency to keep out of the 
clutches of the criminal law. There is no more 



250 Various Views 

important work to be done for our civilization 
to-day than that of shaming such newspapers 
either out of existence or into amended lives, 
and the responsibility for that work is shared by 
all alike. 



Star System in Publishing 251 



THE STAR SYSTEM IN PUBLISHING. 

A few years ago complaint was made, in accents 
more or less querulous, of the fact that the books 
which had the largest sale and enjoyed the widest 
popularity in this country were novels by English 
writers. The American novelist seemed to have 
no chance at all in the competition with his trans- 
atlantic rival. One of the chief arguments by 
which the campaign for international copyright 
had been brought to a successful issue was that 
the American novelist occupied a disadvantageous 
position in his own country, because publishers 
would naturally give preference over his work to 
that of the English novelist who was not in the 
position to exact a royalty. The plea was a 
sound one, and there is no doubt that for many 
years American novelists, as well as American 
writers in other departments of letters, were put 
at a considerable disadvantage by the fact that 
publishers of predatory instincts (and such were 
not lacking) might seize upon whatever English 



252 Various Views 

books they wished, and reproduce them without 
the leave of either authors or proprietors. As be- 
tween an already successful English novel upon 
which no royalty need be paid, and an American 
manuscript which might or might not make a 
successful book and for which the author would 
certainly demand compensation, the balance of 
probable profit turned toward the side of piracy, 
and the American writer who had not already 
conquered his public found it difficult to obtain 
a hearing. At last, however, the law was passed 
which accorded the bare measure of justice (or 
something less than that) to the English author, 
and placed the American author in a position to 
compete with him without being handicapped 
from the start. 

In some respects the working of the law 
proved disappointing. The cheap 'libraries,' it 
is true, found their opportunities restricted, and 
many of them disappeared altogether from the 
market. But the anticipated c boom ' in Ameri- 
can literature was slow in appearing. English 
books that were worth reading, as well as those 
that were not, seemed to find their way into our 
houses almost as readily as before, although it 



Star System in Publishing 253 

was no longer possible to purchase the latest pro- 
duction of Mr. Black or Mr. Hardy for a small 
fraction of a dollar. Such books now came to 
us in respectable garb, and were sold at a fair 
price. The point is that they continued to come 
and to be sold in large numbers. Even our 
popular magazines continued their practice of 
contracting for the serial rights in works of En- 
glish fiction, instead of offering that encourage- 
ment to home industry about which American 
novelists had raised such a clamor. There con- 
tinued to be years in which nearly every one of 
our story magazines had for its principal feature 
the novel of some English writer, offered to 
readers upon the instalment plan. There were 
the stories of Mr. Kipling, for example, and the 
romances of Robert Louis Stevenson, with which 
no American writer of fiction could hope to 
compete. Then there was the series of highly suc- 
cessful individual books, beginning with 'Robert 
Elsmere' and coming down in rapid succession 
to 'Trilby' and c The Christian.' The dear 
public wanted these books, even if it had to pay 
roundly for them ; and those who had expected 
international copyright to effect a revolution in 



254 Various Views 

popular taste found that conditions remained very 
much as they had been before. These selfish 
grounds were not, of course, those upon which 
the serious advocates of that act of plain interna- 
tional duty rested their case, but they no doubt 
had considerable influence in securing its adop- 
tion. 

The conditions of a few years ago seem, how- 
ever, to have become completely changed of late, 
and American fiction seems at last to have come 
to its own. The most striking fact in the pub- 
lishing business of a certain recent year is that 
of the extraordinary success of a few novels by 
American writers. Five such novels have won 
the public favor to such an extent that their sale 
has broken nearly all recent records, that to find 
its match, in the case of American fiction at 
least, we must go back to the history of c Uncle 
Tom's Cabin.' That this success has been in 
all cases deserved, we are by no means willing 
to admit. Of the five novels in question, one is 
a homely character-study having for its passport 
to favor a plentiful supply of mother-wit rather 
than an effective plot. The other four are his- 
torical romances. One of these four, the work 



Star System in Publishing 255 

of a woman, deserves very high praise as repre- 
senting the best type of historical fiction. Two 
of the others are at least admirable narratives, 
and present interesting phases of our colonial 
history with remarkable sympathy, industrious 
grasp of detail, and vivid dramatic force. The 
fourth is an extremely mediocre example of the 
class of work to which it belongs, common in 
both style and treatment, not noticeably better 
or worse than a score of other books of its sort 
published during the twelvemonth, and chiefly 
interesting as an illustration of what can be done 
for a poor book by shrewd and persistent adver- 
tising. On the whole, our cause for satisfaction 
in the success of these five novels is not so great 
as those who are interested in them would have 
us believe, and the record of their sales is a brill- 
iant episode in the history of American book- 
selling rather than in the history of American 
literature. 

Whether the publishing trade is really to be 
congratulated upon such a series of popular suc- 
cesses as this, is open to serious doubt. In one 
case, at least, the profits accruing from a sale of 
hundreds of thousands of copies could not avail 



256 Various Views 

to save a gre-at and long-established house from 
serious business embarrassments. Such enor- 
mous sales of single books, of which the merit, 
even if great, is not likely to be fairly propor- 
tional to the sales, does not seem to us to betoken 
an altogether healthy condition of the publishing 
trade. Publishers themselves know well enough 
that their success in the long run depends, not 
upon the fortunate acquisition of an occasional 
book that enjoys a sky-rocket career, but upon 
the possession of a substantial list of works of 
permanent value, works that occupy a standard 
place in literature and may be depended upon to 
provide a steady income for many years. The 
publisher who has a list of this sort is, of course, 
glad enough to get hold of an exceptionally suc- 
cessful novel from time to time ; such a book 
represents to him so much clear gain, and he 
would not be human did he fail to keep an intel- 
ligent watch for productions of this sort. But 

if he allows his head to be turned bv visions of 

j 

this kind of luck, if he despises the more modest 
but safer ventures, if he bends his energies toward 
achieving an abnormal sale for a few books in- 
stead of a normal sale for many, he is likely to 



Star System in Publishing 257 

come to grief. His real interests lie in the pos- 
session of many claims to public esteem rather 
than in the making of a few successful appeals to 
popular caprice. 

It seems to us that there is an evident analogy 
between the ideal of publishing that aims to push 
a few books into successful acceptance and the 
ideal of theatrical or operatic management which 
depends almost exclusively upon the popularity 
of a few artists. The star system in stage affairs 
has long been understood by all competent ob- 
servers as being extremely demoralizing to the 
true interests of art. The recent history of our 
grand opera has brought this principle home to 
many who had not realized it before. A few 
singers and a few operas become established in 
public favor, and the short-sighted policy of the 
management, relying upon this fact, gathers for 
the time a rich harvest. But presently the public 
wearies of its favorites, and, never having been 
educated to the point of healthy musical culture 
which can find interest and inspiration in a great 
variety of works, never having been made to feel 
that the works themselves and not the manner 

of their performance should be its chief concern, 
17 



258 Various Views 

now deserts the opera-house, in spite of all the 
allurements of new voices and new productions. 
The management then complains that audiences 
have no taste for a varied repertoire, that the 
production of untried compositions spells finan- 
cial disaster. Of course it does : the public 
should have been prepared for these composi- 
tions long before ; they should have been pro- 
duced repeatedly, even at some temporary loss, 
at the time when the public was most clamor- 
ous for the sensations of the hour. The star 
system in publishing brings about very similar 
results. Many worthy books are neglected in 
order that a few may be kept well to the front. 
When the caprice is past, when the serried 
ranks of worn copies of c Trilby ' gather dust 
upon the shelves of the public library, when the 
unsold copies in the hands of the publisher and 
bookseller become c plugs,' the publisher should 
then know better than to complain because his 
other books do not sell. The fact often is that 
he has not tried to sell them, that he has left 
them unadvertised and uncared-for, that they 
have now lost their chance because his c enter- 
prise ' has seen fit to promote the sale of a few 



Star System in Publishing 259 

books at the expense of all the rest. The well- 
advised publisher, in our opinion, is the one who 
recognizes the evils of the star system, and is not 
misled by its promise of present temporary gain. 
He is the publisher who secures for his list as 
many books of lasting value as he can. And he 
is the publisher who cares for the interest of all 
of his books, because he understands that the 
permanent success of his business depends upon 
the acceptability of his total output rather than 
upon the vogue of a few books taken here and 
there from his catalogue. 



260 Various Views 



THE YOUNG PERSON. 

It is a well-known principle of pathology that 
interference with the normal activity of an organ 
results in functional perversion. The atrophy 
that follows upon the disuse of one organ may 
have for a concomitant the excessive develop- 
ment of others, with some form of degeneration 
as a consequence; or the over-stimulation of one 
may be accompanied by a weakening of all the 
others, leading in the end to dissolution. In 
either case, whether the disturbing physiological 
factor take the shape of a forced activity here or 
a suppressed activity there, the result is some 
development of distinctly morbid type. Now 
the analogies between the organism of the indi- 
vidual and the larger social organism are always 
instructive, if philosophically dealt with, and the 
thought of the past thirty or forty years has been 
particularly fruitful in applications of this method 
of comparison. The whole modern science of 
sociology, for example, may be described as an 



The Young Person 261 

expansion of this fundamental idea, and gets its 
most trustworthy results from the intelligent dis- 
cussion of these analogies. It is our purpose 
just now to apply to one aspect of literary activity 
the method in question, and to ask if it may not 
have some instruction for the critic of contem- 
porary literature. 

That reverence is due to the young is one of 
the most venerable of critical maxims. It has 
been knocking about in literature ever since it be- 
came embalmed in one of the satires of Juvenal, 
and perhaps for longer than that. It has very 
noticeably influenced the literary production of 
the present century, but it has not always been 
wisely apprehended and applied. Let us take a 
moment to see what has been done with this 
precept in the case of the two greatest literatures 
of our time — the French and the English. In 
both instances there has been at work a sub- 
conscious instinct that has sought to keep from 
the contemplation of youthful minds certain 
parts of human life and certain phases of human 
emotion. But the instinct has worked itself out 
in curiously different ways. French books have 
become sharply differentiated into books for the 



262 Various Views 

Young Person and books for the full-grown man 
or woman. English books, on the other hand, 
have nearly all been written, until very lately, 
with the Young Person carefully in view, and, 
it would often seem, without any consideration 
for any other class of readers. These two theo- 
ries, carried to extremes, have been productive 
of the most ludicrous results, exemplified, in the 
one case, by the school-girl editions of c Tele- 
maque ' which carefully substitute amiti'e for 
amour ; in the other, by such an anecdote as has 
recently gone the rounds of the newspapers, re- 
vealing the fact that a popular magazine of wide 
circulation in this country does not permit any 
mention of wine to be made in its pages. And 
both of these theories, even when kept within 
bounds, seem to us to have led to an abnormal 
condition of things in the literatures that have 
respectively practised them. 

We all know Matthew Arnold's hard saying 
about the French people — that they have de- 
voted themselves to the worship of the great 
goddess of lubricity. This remark was never 
meant to be taken without qualification, as many 
passages of Arnold's critical works show plainly 



The Young Person 263 

enough. It may be sufficient to instance his 
judgment of George Sand, pronounced upon 
hearing of her death. c She was the greatest 
spirit in our European world from the time that 
Goethe departed. With all her faults and 
Frenchisms, she was this.' The warmest ad- 
mirers of that woman of genius will feel that 
something more than justice is done her by this 
bit of eulogy, but they will also feel that the 
man who uttered it must have had strong 
grounds for what harsh things he at times felt 
bound to say about modern French literature. 
That literature doubtless gives undue promi- 
nence to one particular form of passion, and 
doubtless sins against the proprieties more fre- 
quently and more conspicuously than any litera- 
ture ought to doo To revert to the pathological 
figure of our introductory paragraph, French 
literature seems, in its treatment of the relations 
of the sexes, to have suffered a sort of fatty de- 
generation, and erotic path de foie have entered 
too largely into the daily diet of its consumers. 
It seems to us quite clear that one of the causes 
of this abnormal development must be sought 
for in an unnatural separation of books for the 



264 Various Views 

Young Person from books for the Gallic adult. 
Since (in theory, at least) the Young Person is 
never supposed to see the books written for his 
elders, there is no need of writing them virgin- 
ibus puerisque, and all restraint and all reticence 
are thrown to the winds. 

The English theory, of course, has been as 
far removed from the French theory as possible. 
Taking for granted that the Young Person is 
quite as likely as anybody else to read a book of 
any sort, all books (broadly speaking) have been 
written with his needs and limitations in view, 
and the result has been an emasculated literature, 
from which discussion of certain subjects has 
been excluded by as effective a taboo as was ever 
practised among the South Sea islanders. News- 
paper cant and the censorship of the circulating 
libraries have so narrowed the scope of nineteenth- 
century English literature that the future student 
of Victorian manners and morals will have to go 
outside of literature to get the facts in proper 
perspective. These remarks apply with equal 
force to the English literature produced upon 
our own side of the Atlantic. The suppression 
of natural literary activity thus indicated has been 



The Young Person 265 

correcting itself of late, and in the usual violent 
way. Unless atrophy has gone so far as to prove 
fatal, nature usually contrives to reassert herself, 
and throws the whole organism into disorder by 
so doing. The last few years have brought real- 
ism and plain-speaking back into English litera- 
ture, and with a vengeance. The dovecotes of 
hypocrisy have been fluttered by ominous birds 
of prey, and the sober-minded, who have all 
along viewed with apprehension the attempt to 
keep English literature in a straight-jacket, have 
stood alternately amused and aghast at the antics 
with which it has celebrated its newly-acquired 

libertv. 

j 

The problem is certainly a vexatious one. 
The example of one nation shows us the bad 
effects of ignoring the Young Person ; the ex- 
ample of another furnishes an instructive lesson 
in the consequences of deferring to him over- 
much. Unbounded license is an unquestionable 
evil ; the cramping of ideals, on the other hand, 
leads to a reaction almost equally evil. Whether 
the one course be pursued or the other, freedom 
of literary expression will find its stout champions, 
as it has already found them in both countries, 



266 Various Views 

from Moliere to Mr. Swinburne. We do not 
want a revival of eighteenth century grossness. 
Mr. Gosse says, in a recent critique, that with 
Mr. Hardy's latest novel 'we have traced the 
full circle of propriety. A hundred and fifty years 
ago, Fielding and Smollett brought up before us 
pictures, used expressions, described conduct, 
which appeared to their immediate successors a 
little more crude than general reading warranted. 
In Miss Burney's hands, and in Miss Austen's 
the morals were still further hedged about. Scott 
was even more daintily reserved. We came at 
last to Dickens, where the clamorous passions of 
mankind, the coarser accidents of life, were ab- 
solutely ignored, and the whole question of pop- 
ulation seemed reduced to the theory of the 
gooseberry bush. This was the ne plus ultra of 
decency ; Thackeray and George Eliot relaxed 
this intensity of prudishness ; once on the turn, 
the tide flowed rapidly, and here is Mr. Hardy 
ready to say any mortal thing that Fielding said, 
and a great deal more too.' 

Fortunately, we are not yet forced to take 
c Jude the Obscure' as typical of our century and 
literature, although the atrocious faults of taste 



The Young Person 267 

displayed by that book do not stand alone to 
represent their class. And we cannot agree with 
Mr. Gosse in saying that to censure such out- 
spokenness c is the duty of the moralist and not 
the critic.' If criticism has any most imperative 
duty, it is precisely the one so airily disclaimed 
by this self-constituted spokesman for the craft. 
And there is not much palliation for such an 
offence as Mr. Hardy's in the prefatory danger- 
signal which describes the book as c a novel ad- 
dressed by a man to men and women of full age.' 
This is the French theory over again, and might 
be used to cloak all of the French excesses. It 
seems to us that the real solution of the problem 
presented by the Young Person must take the 
form of a compromise, and that a compromise is 
possible that shall mean neither a loss of virility 
in literature nor the exposure of the immature to 
corrupting influences. We need, first of all, to 
clear our minds of cant on the subject of the 
supposed ignorance of the Young Person. The 
Frenchman knows perfectly well that his theory 
does not work, and that boys and girls read the 
books they are not supposed to read. The En- 
glishman knows equally well that his theory 



268 Various Views 

works no better, and that boys and girls who do 
not get a knowledge of life from literature get it 
in other and usually worse ways. Why should 
we not admit right away that our education is not 
as frank as it ought to be ? With this admission 
we might couple the plea, on the one hand, for 
less prudishness than we have been accustomed 
to put into books likely to fall into the hands of 
the Young Person ; while sternly insisting, on the 
other hand, that all literature should be clean, 
that grossness is a thing unpardonable in itself, 
and not merely for its degrading influence upon 
a certain possible class of readers. Some such 
middle ground as this should be found safe for 
all the interests concerned ; it should result in a 
literature both strengthened and purified, not 
losing from view the needs of the Young Person, 
but rather according them a more rational con- 
sideration than they have had hitherto. 



The New Patriotic Impulse 269 



THE NEW PATRIOTIC IMPULSE. 

A great deal has been said, during the past few 
years, about the rekindling of American patriot- 
ism that has resulted from the war with Spain 
and its sequela. We are once more a united 
people, and we stand together in the defence of 
the national honor, and new glories have been 
won for the American flag, and we have taken 
our proper place among the great powers, and 
our manifest destiny has again declared itself in 
the impressive deeds by which the triumph of 
our arms has been accomplished. The changes 
have been rung upon all the familiar phrases of 
political oratory, gold and pinchbeck alike, and 
flamboyant boastings from every quarter of the 
land have convinced men only too willing to be 
persuaded that our feet w 7 ere indeed planted upon 
4 glory-crowned heights.' The emotions to which 
explosive vent has been given are, no doubt, sin- 
cere enough to deserve a certain measure of 
respect even from those who know how hollow 



270 Various Views 

in reality the most resonant phrases may be, and 
how recklessly the political rhetorician will indulge 
in sentiments to which the whole tenor of his 
career gives the lie. But thinking men have 
never been content, in America or elsewhere, to 
accept at their face value the counters of the 
politician. As was recently said in 4 The Na- 
tion,' i in the case of such men, the proposed 
sentiments of humanity and morality really count 
for nothing at all. They regard them merely as 
mouth-filling phrases, which sound well and 
please their constituents; and never dream that 
they will one day return to plague them, or that 
anybody will think of holding them to their own 
professions.' And whether such sentiments come 
from some high official like the war-lord of 
Washington, or from the most servile henchman 
of a political party having at bottom no nobler 
motive than party advantage and no higher aim 
than plunder, their ring is false, and will deceive 
only those who wish to be deceived. 

The new patriotic impulse to which we here 
wish to call attention finds no illustrations in the 
noisy plaudits of those who din daily into our 
ears the catchwords of duty and destiny — the 



The New Patriotic Impulse 271 

duty of advancing civilization by fire and sword, 
the destiny which may only be asserted by deny- 
ing to alien peoples the fundamental rights of 
man. Rather do we hear through all this din 
the accents of a still small voice recalling to us 
that our true duties lie close at hand, and that 
the national destinies wrought out for us by 
Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln are abso- 
lutely incompatible with our new-fangled dreams 
of empire. And because this voice, which is no 
other than the voice of the national conscience, 
has not breathed out its protest unheeded, but 
has found so many fearless spokesmen, filled 
with passion for the ideals that all true Ameri- 
cans have cherished hitherto, and thrilling with 
indignation at the present desecration of those 
ideals, it has seemed to us that this new mani- 
festation of the spirit of the finer patriotism is a 
most noteworthy phenomenon, not to be paral- 
elled more than two or three times in the whole 
course of our history. In behalf of this protest 
against the abandonment of the principles by 
which our moral stature as a nation has hitherto 
been determined, there has been enlisted, in the 
words of ex-Governor George S. Boutwell, c an 



272 Various Views 

array of names such as has not been brought to- 
gether in support of a common cause since the 
signing of the Declaration of independence.' So 
many are these names, and so great is their influ- 
ence as leaders of both thought and action, that 
we shall not attempt the invidious task of sing- 
ling out a few for special mention. A score or 
more of them will occur at once to the mind of 
any well-informed reader, and every fair critic 
must admit that they represent an overwhelming 
preponderance of the intelligence and morality of 
our fellow-citizens. 

The attempt of a time-serving press to attach 
to these names the stigma of treason is one that 
falls with the weight of its own absurdity. Their 
position is exactly that of Chatham and Burke 
in opposing another war of subjugation over a 
hundred years ago. It is for the courage of their 
attitude in resisting a perverse and short-sighted 
colonial policy that those men are held in the 
highest honor by Englishmen and Americans 
alike. The verdict of history metes out even 
justice to the men who in any age withstand the 
outbursts of popular folly ; and who can doubt 
that, in our own present case, when c the tumult 



The New Patriotic Impulse 273 

and the shouting dies/ the leaders who now, at 
no small cost of temporary popularity, stand for 
the principles of the Fathers of our Government, 
and speak for c the mighty hopes that make us 
men ' in a sense unknown to European history, 
will be adjudged by no remote posterity to have 
won for themselves a crown of exceeding great 
glory. Whatever may be the outcome of the 
struggle to preserve for this nation the ideals upon 
which its true grandeur has been based — whether 
our ship 'of state reach its haven or suffer ship- 
wreck — the honor of these men is secure. 
They have fought the good fight, and history 
will set them high among the heroes of our race. 
In a certain sense, the judgment of history is 
already pronounced. What history says of any 
age is determined largely by what the most force- 
ful minds of that age have said of its issues. 
The men who are to-day speaking to us with 
the authority of experience and ripened political 
wisdom are the men to whom the historian of 
the future will turn for light, just as we now 
turn for light upon the history of our Revolu- 
tionary struggle to the living words of Burke 
and Chatham, of Washington and Jefferson. 

18 



274 Various Views 

These considerations bring us to the more 
special subject of the present discussion. We 
Americans have a great wealth of political lit- 
erature, for our bent toward the discussion of 
problems of statecraft is as marked as was that 
of the Athenians. Much of this literature is mere 
volubility, and whatever heat it once had has 
long since become dissipated. But the best of this 
literature is still a living force, for it deals with the 
most vital features of our polity, and its interest 
remains perennial. When we survey the cher- 
ished masterpieces of our political writing — its 
eloquent oratory and its calm intellectual appeal 
— we find that they centre about two great themes 
— the struggle for independence and a national 
union, and the struggle to preserve that union and 
make it stand for freedom in the largest meaning, 
for the equality of all men in the sight of the law. 
It is this latter aspect of the secular conflict 
which now again confronts us, and the cause at 
issue makes upon us a demand no less imperious 
than the demand that was made upon an earlier 
generation by the harsh pretensions of the En- 
glish crown, and upon a later one by the arrogant 
pretensions of the slave-owning oligarchy. He 



The New Patriotic Impulse 275 

must be blind indeed who does not see that the 
same essential principles are now again at stake, 
and that the outcome of the present deplorable 
situation is fraught with the same enormous pos- 
sibilities for good or for evil. 

In this serious condition of affairs, our writers 
have not been found wanting, and it is with the 
deepest satisfaction that we call attention to the 
way in which they have risen to the high occasion 
offered them. There is growing up about the 
present subject of contention a mass of literature 
which is conceived in accordance with the noblest 
traditions of American thought. Even in mere 
bulk it is already almost comparable with the lit- 
erature inspired by opposition to the institution 
of slavery, and in quality it is no whit inferior, 
either in its impassioned earnestness or in its 
deep resolve to maintain to the death those stand- 
ards of justice and human right that so many 
seem now to be weakly forsaking. The thought 
which infuses all this writing is indeed that which 

* Helped our fathers' souls to live, 
And bids the waning century bloom anew.' 

It is the thought of men too sturdy in their 
Americanism to be swept away from their moor- 



276 Various Views 

ings by the gusts of partisan folly, and too sure 

that they are right to be influenced by any array 

of hostile numbers. It is the thought of men 

each one of whom would be content to stand 

with serene conscience an Athanasius contra 

mundum, each one of whom would reecho the 

4 Ultima Verba ' of Victor Hugo, 

* Sans chercher a savolr et sans considerer 
Si quelqiTun a plie qifon aurait cm plus ferme, 
Et si plusieurs s'en vont qui devraient demeurer/ 

The defenders of our latter-day imperialism have 
not yet come to understand the temper of this 
opposition to their reckless course. They treat 
it as a difference of opinion, but it is nothing of 
the sort. A4en may have opinions about such 
matters as the tariff and the currency, but the 
proposition to cast aside the doctrines of the Con- 
stitution and the Declaration, the counsels of 
Washington and Lincoln, the sanctions of free 
government that have been inculcated upon 
Americans from their earliest childhood — this 
proposition runs counter to the most sacred con- 
victions of all men to whom Americanism is 
more than an empty name. 

Let us enumerate a few — a very few — of 



The New Patriotic Impulse 277 

the writings that have responded to this wild on- 
slaught upon the principles that make the Amer- 
ican name dear to us. There are the lectures 
and addresses contained in President Jordan's 
c Imperial Democracy,' a volume which is a 
complete arsenal of fact and argument. There 
are such papers as c The Present Crisis,' by Ed- 
win D. Mead ; c Our Nation's Peril,' by Dr. 
Lewis G. Janes; c Imperialism, and the Tracks 
of Our Forefathers,' by Mr. Charles Francis 
Adams; c England in 1776: America in 1899,' 
by Mr. William M. Salter; and c The Conquest 
of the United States by Spain,' by Professor 
William G. Sumner. There are such speeches 
as those of Senator Hoar in Congress, of Mr. 
Carl Schurz in Chicago and elsewhere, of Pro- 
fessor Charles Eliot Norton at the Ashfleld 
Dinner. There are such fugitive writings as the 
c Open Letter' from ex-Senator Henderson, and 
'The Philippine Piracy,' by Professor William 
James. There are innumerable other contribu- 
tions to this literature of protest and warning, 
offered by such men as President Eliot, Professor 
von Hoist, Bishop Henry C. Potter, Bishop John 
L. Spaulding, Professor Felix Adler, and the Rev. 



278 Various Views 

Henry Van Dyke. Now, of all this literature it 
is not enough to say that it cannot be ignored. 
Much of it is so admirable in form, besides being 
suffused with the lasting qualities of fine intelli- 
gence and exalted emotion, that it is sure of 
preservation among the most noteworthy exam- 
ples of American patriotic eloqence. The future 
student and compiler of such literature will be 
justified in placing Senator Hoar's great speech 
beside Webster's reply to Hayne, and Professor 
Sumner's Phi Beta Kappa address beside the 
finest efforts of his great namesake. One reads 
these masterly productions with the same glow 
of feeling that is inspired by the traditional mod- 
els of our eloquence, and the youth of the future 
will take from them the same contagion of en- 
thusiasm which our generation has caught from 
their old-time prototypes. Their present value 
is that they strengthen our faith in the potency 
of our cherished ideals, and bid us take heart for 
our country however dark the present outlook. 
What to the faint-hearted may seem one sweep- 
ing degringolade of principles and institutions can- 
not, after all, be a reality as long as such voices 
as these are raised to recall us to the old paths of 



The New Patriotic Impulse 279 

national virtue and sobriety. c This spasm of folly 
and delusion also, in my judgment, will surely 
pass by/ are among the closing words of Senator 
Hoar's memorable speech. And w T hat true Amer- 
ican should not be proud to echo the words that 
follow : c Whether it passes by or not, I thank 
God I have done my duty, and that I have ad- 
hered to the great doctrines of righteousness and 
freedom, which I learned from my fathers, and 
in whose service my life has been spent.' 

Such a literature as this makes us almost glad 
that the occasion for it has arisen. The awaken- 
ing from our fancied security has been rude, and 
the perils to which we are exposed have become 
imminent; but we now know, at least, that the 
voices that were raised in past crises of our na- 
tional life have found worthy successors, and 
that the torch has been handed on still aflame. 
The poets, indeed, we sadly miss, although Mr. 
William Vaughn Moody, with his c Ode in 
Time of Hesitation,' has risen nobly to the 
occasion. We know well with what prophetic 
fire our Whittier, were he now alive, would 
arouse our sluggish conscience, and our Lowell 
scourge with the scorpion whip of his indigna- 



280 Various Views 

tion the traducers of our national character. But 
the words of the poets have this advantage over 
all common words, that they apply to other times 
and places than those by which they are imme- 
diately occasioned, and neither c Ichabod ' nor 
the 'Biglow Papers" could in reality be bettered 
for our present needs. What, in fact, could a 
Lowell now say that would be more exactly to 
the point than these familiar stanzas, and the 
note by which they are supplemented : 

6 We were gittin"' on nicely up here to our village, 
With good old idees o* 1 wut's right an' wut aint, 
We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage, 
An' thet eppyletts worn't the bestm ark of a saint; 
But John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez this kind o 1 thing's an exploded idee. 

( The side of our country must oilers be took, 

An' President Polk, you know, he is our country. 
An 1 the angel that writes all our sins in a book 
Puts the debit to him, and to us the per contry ,• 
And John P. 
Robinson he 
Sez this is his view o' the thing to a T.' 

* Our country is bounded on the north and the south, on 
the east and the west, by Justice, and when she oversteps 
that invisible boundary-line by so much as a hair's-breadth, 



The New Patriotic Impulse 281 

she ceases to be our mother, and chooses to be looked 
upon quasi nonjerca. That is a hard choice when our 
earthly love of country calls upon us to tread one path 
and our duty points us to another. We must make as 
noble and becoming an election as did Penelope between 
Icarius and Ulysses. Veiling our faces, we must take 
silently the hand of Duty to follow her.' 



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